Author: David Martin

North Staffordshire’s Industrial Landscape Merits World Heritage Site Status

The Harecastle Tunnels on the Trent & Mersey Canal at Kidsgrove

There are no historical reasons to prevent North Staffordshire’s Industrial Landscape from becoming a World Heritage Site.

In the 18th century, North Staffordshire helped to make England “the workshop of the world.” Local entrepreneurs, like Wedgwood and Adams, transformed a group of small towns into an industrial area of international importance.

James Brindley’s Trent & Mersey Canal “kick-started” the Industrial Revolution, which made Britain “the Workshop of the World. The canal and railway tunnels between Kidsgrove and Chatterley are significant feats of civil engineering. They merit World Heritage Site status in their own right.

The Primitive Methodist Church was founded in North Staffordshire by Hugh Bourne and William Clowes. It gave the Potteries its unique culture and a way of life that Arnold Bennett vividly portrayed in his novels.

Burslem’s “old town hall” is one of the finest examples of Victorian civic architecture. The Wedgwood Institute’s terracotta facade is an inspiring tribute to the men, women and children who worked in local industries.

The former colliery at Chatterley Whitfield should have been made a World Heritage Site many years ago.

Making North Staffordshire’s Industrial Landscape a World Heritage Site would encourage economic regeneration and create new employment opportunities.

Tom Brown’s Journey to Rugby

At three o’clock on a cold, frosty February morning in 1834, his father put him on an express stagecoach bound for Rugby. Thomas had an outside seat next to the guard who looked after him during the journey.
A typical scene at a 19th Century Coaching Inn

Judge Thomas Hughes, who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays, presided over County Courts in South Cheshire. The book is an autobiographical novel about his early life.

His father sent him to Rugby School when he was eleven. In the book, he describes his first journey to school.

At three o’clock on a February morning in 1834, his father put him on an express stagecoach bound for Rugby. Thomas had an outside seat next to the guard who looked after him during the journey. It was a bitterly cold and frosty morning. He was given a glass of hot beer and rum to keep out the cold. Yet, he was still half-frozen when the coach stopped for breakfast at a coaching inn.

“Twenty minutes here, gentlemen,” says the coachman as they pull up at half past seven at the inn door.

Have we not endured nobly this morning, and is not this a worthy reward for much endurance? We enter a low, dark, wainscoted room whose walls are hung with sporting prints. A hatstand is by the door, with a whip or two in it. They belong to commercial travellers who are still snug in bed. The room has a blazing fire, casting a warm and inviting glow. There is quaint old glass over the mantelpiece… The table is covered with the whitest of cloths and china dishes full of food. There is a pigeon pie, a ham, cold beef cut from a mammoth ox and a large loaf of bread. The stout head waiter comes, puffing under a tray of hot viands. On the tray are kidneys, roast beef, rashers of bacon, poached eggs, buttered toast, muffins, tea and coffee. The table can never hold it all. The cold meats are taken off the table and put on the sideboard. They were there for show and to give us an appetite. And now fall on gentlemen all.

“Tea or coffee sir?” says the head waiter coming round to Tom.

“Coffee, please,” says Tom, with his mouth full of muffins and kidneys. Coffee is a treat to him; tea is not.

Our coachman has breakfast with us. He eats cold beef and drinks a tankard of ale brought to him by the barmaid.

For breakfast, Tom had kidney and pigeon pie. He drank coffee, and his little skin became ‘as tight as a drum.’ After breakfast, he paid the head waiter and boarded the stagecoach to continue his journey.

Edited by The History Factory (2024)

Making Staffordshire Oatcakes At Home

Oatcake shops used to be small and plentiful, with sales being made through open windows. The last of these shops, the Hole In The Wall in Stoke-on-Trent, closed due to redevelopment. Commercial firms still make oatcakes in batches of six and twelve. They are sold by supermarkets, but the best oatcakes are the ones you make at home.

Staffordshire Oatcakes
Staffordshire Oatcakes

Anglo-Saxon Tunstall

An Anglo-Saxon Village

Tunstall is one of the oldest towns in the Potteries. Its Old English name suggests it dates from the late 5th or 6th century. 

The Anglo-Saxons called a town or village surrounded by a ditch and a stockade a “Tun”, and a “Stall” was a place inside the stockade where cattle were kept. 

Anglo-Saxon Tunstall was built at the crossroads where a road from the Staffordshire Moorlands to Chester crossed the main highway linking London and the East Midlands with the North West and Scotland. Part of the highway’s route through Tunstall can be traced by following Oldcourt Street, America Street, Hawes Street and Summerbank Road to its junction with High Street. 

The road from the Staffordshire Moorlands to Chester may have been a drove road.

Old drove roads are not easy to trace. In places, they were a quarter of a mile wide. We believe the road from the Staffordshire Moorlands entered Tunstall near the Wheatsheaf Inn and passed through the village on a track called Green Street, which is now Roundwell Street.  

All physical traces of Anglo-Saxon Tunstall have disappeared. Two old field names, God’s Croft and Church Field, tell us there was a church in the village. Another old field name, Cross Croft, suggests that a marketplace may have existed.       

(Revised July 2025)

Tunstall’s First Market

John Henry Clive founded an unincorporated company that gave Tunstall a market hall and a Market Place (Tower Square).

He was born at Bath on 29 March 1781. After his father’s death, John and his mother, Sarah, came to live in Longton.

On 28 May 1793, Sarah married earthenware manufacturer Charles Simpson at St. Giles’ Church, Newcastle-under-Lyme.  

John served an apprenticeship in the pottery industry. He married Lydia Cash on 30 September 1805 at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Norton-in-the Moors.

Shortly after John’s wedding, his stepfather, Charles Simpson, started making pottery at a factory in Sandyford.

Sarah and Charles left Longton and moved to Tunstall, where they lived at Newfield Hall. John and Lydia came to live with them. John managed the Newfield Estate for its owner, Admiral Smith Child, and went into partnership with him. They formed a company, Child & Clive. The firm mined coal and ironstone at Clanway Colliery and made earthenware at Newfield Pottery. 

John was an astute entrepreneur. He realised Tunstall was a growing industrial town. A town that needed shops, a market square and a civic building containing a covered market and a courtroom, where Justices of the Peace could hold Petty Sessions (Magistrates’ Courts) and try minor criminal cases.

John formed a company to finance the project and sold its shares to local businesspeople. The company leased a plot of land, on a field called Stony Croft, for 500 years at an annual rent of £5 from Walter Sneyd, the Lord of the Manor, who lived at Keele Hall. Shares in the company cost £25 each. John bought one share. Walter bought eight, and Ralph Hall, the company’s treasurer, bought two.  

Between 1816 and 1817, the company created Market Place, a market square surrounded by shops and erected a civic building. The building had two names until it became known as the Town Hall in the 1840s. The company called it the Courthouse, and the Sneyd family called it the Market Hall. In the late 1830s, Market Place’s name was changed to Market Square.

NSH-2o24(F) 

A Pottery Ballad

A song for the Potters,
The Staffordshire Potters,
A lay for their children so tender and young,
Who treading the jiggers,
Toiling as slaves,
Suffer, with them, much oppression and wrong.

Chorus: Who treading etc.

At six in the morning,
Ere daybreak is dawning,
Mere infants in Petticoats stand at the wheel,
Privations enduring,
While barely securing,
The means of procuring the requisite meal.

Chorus: Privations etc.

And when evening shadows,
Flit over the meadows,
And songsters are snug and asleep in their nest,
Still heavily laden,
The meek little maiden,
Has much to endure ere retiring to rest.

Chorus: Still heavily etc.

Their poor little brothers,
In common with others,
Their equal in stature, who toil through the day,
Not one duty shunning,
Are either 'mould running',
Or working like slaves in the wedging of clay.

Chorus: Not one duty etc.

A whip for the fathers,
A rod for the mothers,
So early for labour, who drag them from school, 
Thus changing their nature,
While stunting their stature,
And dwarfing their energies, body and soul.

Chorus: Thus changing etc.

The eye of the nation,
Winks not at oppression,
Philanthropists soon to their rescue will come,
While public opinion,
The sword of the million,
Will smite all the minions of slavery dumb.

Chorus: While public etc.

Ye stalwart and strong ones,
Oh pity the young ones,
By parents consigned to the doom of the slave!
Let it be your mission, 
To change their condition,
By rescuing them from a premature grave,

Chorus: Let it be etc.

All ye that are healthy,
All ye that are wealthy,
And willing to help them with heart and with hand,
Come on like a river,
And banish for ever,
The remnant of slavery, far from the land.

Chorus: Come on like a river etc.

Anonymous 
Written 1864

We Need Your Help

North Staffordshire Heritage is publishing a series of history books and booklets about Tunstall and is trying to find old photographs of the town. If you can help, please email David at davidmartin227@outlook.com

R.06.09.24

Weeds in Tower Square

Tunstall’s Neglected Heritage

The clock tower in Tower Square, Tunstall.
Weeds at the base of the Smith Child Clock Tower in Tower Square.

Our photograph shows weeds growing at the base of the Smith Child Clock Tower in Tower Square. The tower was erected in 1893 to honour Sir Smith Child, the town’s most generous 19th-century philanthropist.

Tell us about neglected buildings in Tunstall which need regenerating and help save them from demolition.

You can email us at northstaffordshireheritage@0utlook.com

The War Memorial Gardens

Tunstall’s Neglected Heritage

The old shelter in Tunstall's Memorial Gardens
The shelter in Tunstall’s War Memorial Gardens i

Our new series Tunstall’s Neglected Heritage looks at heritage buildings in Tunstall that face an uncertain future.

This photograph of the shelter in Tunstall’s War Memorial Gardens shows weeds growing on the roof, a gutter needing repair, a vandalised mural and a room whose door and window are boarded-up.

Tell us about other buildings in Tunstall that have been neglected by their owners and need regeneration or a facelift to save them from demolition.

Our email address is northstaffordshireheritage@outlook.com

Daimler buses ran from Mow Cop to Tunstall

After the First World War, former soldiers and sailors set up small bus companies and ran bus services from towns and villages on the North Staffordshire Coalfield to Tunstall.
A forty-horsepower Daimler Bus

In 1914, the Potteries Electric Traction Company started running bus services from Biddulph and Mow Cop to Tunstall, using forty-horsepower Daimler Buses.

During the First World War (1914-1918), the government requisitioned the buses and services were suspended. The buses were sent to France, where they were used to take troops to the front line. When the war ended, the buses were returned to the company, and the services resumed.

After the First World War, former soldiers and sailors formed bus companies. The companies ran services to Tunstall that competed with those run by the Potteries Motor Traction Company.

Rowbotham’s was a bus company with a garage in Sands Road, Harriseahead. The firm ran a service from The Bank, a hamlet in South Cheshire, to Tunstall. Its buses ran through Mount Pleasant, Dales Green, The Rookery, Whitehill, Newchapel Packmoor, Chell and Pitts Hill.

The Potteries Electric Traction Company operated another service from The Bank to Tunstall. Its route ran through Mount Pleasant, Dales Green, The Rookery, Whitehill, Kidsgrove, Goldenhill and Sandyford.

Stanier’s was a bus company based in Newchapel. It ran a service from Mow Cop to Tunstall via Harriseahead, Newchapel, Packmoor, Chell and Pitts Hill.