Daydreaming is Stoke-on-Trent College’s 2025 end of year art exhibition at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. A vibrant mixture of students’ work will take you into a world of surrealism, imagination and different perspectives.
Short films created by students will be shown. A presentation, “The Plastic Ocean”, will raise your awareness of plastic pollution and highlight its impact on marine ecosystems.
The exhibition runs until Sunday, 31st August.
Appetite has organised an open-air pop-up exhibition to celebrate the life of Arthur Berry.
Berry was a playwright, poet and painter. The exhibition explores his life and the impact he had on art and culture in the Potteries.
The exhibition opens in the City Centre on August 4th. It runs there until September 14th. Then it moves to Newcastle-under-Lyme. It reopens there on September 20th and runs until October 1st.
Do you remember the Theatre Royal in Hanley (the City Centre)? Were you a Hanley Babe, or did you help backstage? If you have memories or photographs of the Theatre Royal you want to share with the Claybody Theatre, come to the Dipping House, 5 Spode Courtyard, Church Street, Stoke, on Wednesday, June 25, between 7pm and 8.30pm. All are welcome, and refreshments are provided.
North Staffordshire Heritage would like to celebrate the City of Stoke-on-Trent’s Centenary by showing a series of film strips.
The film strips were made by local schools in 1960. They celebrated the 50th anniversary of the amalgamation of the six towns, which created the County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent.
We have the film strip, The Township of Tunstall, made by Highgate Secondary School. The filmstrips about Burslem, Hanley, Stoke-upon-Trent, Fenton and Longton are missing.
If you can help us trace them, please get in touch with northstaffordshireheritage@outlook.com
We hope to show a series of film strips during Stoke-on-Trent’s Centenary Year. Schools in the six towns made these film strips in 1960 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent’s creation.
North Staffordshire Heritage has the scripts for all these film strips. But we only have one film strip, the Township of Tunstall, made by Highgate Secondary School.
The film strips about Burslem, Hanley, Stoke-upon-Trent, Fenton and Longton are missing. If you can help us trace them, please email northstaffordshireheritage@outlook.com
Fenton is called Stoke-on-Trent’s Forgotten Town
We hope to show a series of film strips during Stoke-on-Trent’s Centenary Year.
Schools in the six towns made these films in 1960. They were made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent’s creation.
North Staffordshire Heritage has the scripts for all these film strips. But, we only have one film strip, The Township of Tunstall, made by Highgate Secondary School.
The film strips about Burslem, Hanley, Stoke-upon-Trent, Fenton and Longton are missing. If you can help us trace them, please email northstaffordshireheritage@outlook.com
DM/LW /BC(2024)
Simeon Ackroyd Shaw was born in Salford on April 17th, 1785. He became the Potteries’ leading intellectual in the first half of the 19th century.
Simeon came to North Staffordshire, where he worked as a printer and compositor for the Potteries Gazette and Newcastle-under-Lyme Advertiser.
In 1985, Keele University’s Department of Adult Education published People of the Potteries. The book says that by 1818, Simeon was “running an academy for young gentlemen in Northwood, Hanley”. According to People of the Potteries, in 1822, Simeon owned a commercial academy in Piccadilly, Hanley. By 1834, he had a large academy in the town’s Market Place.
When he was writing By-gone Tunstall (Published in 1913), William J. Harper was given notes called Tunstall Reminiscences written by Simeon’s grandson, Mr W. S. Shaw. In these reminiscences, Mr Shaw says his grandfather lived in Piccadilly Street, Tunstall. He had one of North Staffordshire’s largest and most influential academies in the Market Place (Tower Square).
White’s Directory of Staffordshire, published in 1834, shows that Simeon owned an academy in Market Place, Tunstall. Official records prove that he lived in Piccadilly Street, which ran from Market Place to Sneyd Street (Ladywell Road).
Simeon was still living in Piccadilly Street in 1851. He died on April 8th, 1859 and was buried in Bethesda churchyard Hanley.
In his Romance of Staffordshire (Published in the 1870s), Henry Wedgwood describes the Swan Inn, a coaching inn where stagecoaches to London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool stopped to pick up passengers. He writes:
It is wonderful how soon public buildings pass from memory. How completely the “Old Swan Inn”, Hanley, is now buried in the past and, along with the memory of those who met to socialise under its roof.
The old inn was a large building with strange-looking wings and gable ends, with square-built chimneys and gothic windows, some of them exceedingly small and mullioned by heavy stonework. There were iron palisades at the front of the inn and an extensive bowling green at the rear. The front entrance was covered by a flat canopy supported by stone pillars.
Inside there were queer, old, little rooms with chimney nooks and ancient screens that told of bygone days. There was one large room used by local clubs and for civic celebrations where speeches were made about the state of the pottery industry.
One of the rooms at the rear of the inn had a large bay window that overlooked the bowling green. In this room, the magistrates held petty sessions to try summary offences. They sent those suspected of committing indictable offences for trial at Quarter Sessions or the Assize Courts, which sat in the Shire Hall at Stafford.
(Edited by North Staffordshire Heritage)
Hanley’s bullring, where bulls were baited on Sundays, was near the Cock Inn at Far Green. Henry Wedgwood, in his Romance of Staffordshire, says the bullring was a place where ” some poor animal was attacked by dogs” and tortured by men. He writes:
Bull baiting was organised by men who frequented the Cock Inn, a small tavern with a thatched roof.
Writing about bull baiting, Wedgwood asks his readers to picture an infuriated bull made fast to a stake or a ring driven into the ground. The bullring was surrounded by hundreds of people – both men and women. Standing in front of the crowd were men restraining snarling dogs struggling to break free and attack the bull.
Spectators were betting on which dog would bring the bull to its knees. There were excited shrieks from its supporters when the dog they had bet on was sent into the ring. They cheered if the dog’s teeth tore flesh from the bull’s nose or another part of its body.
During the winter months, when bull baiting took place in the late afternoon or early evening, the ring was lit by torches made from long pieces of pit rope resoaked in pitch.
According to Wedgwood, the crowd surrounding the bullring was a drunken rabble that included colliers whose faces were as black as midnight and potters wearing leather aprons and breaches.
When the bull collapsed with exhaustion, its tormentors, egged on by the spectators, attempted to force it to get up by prodding it with sharp spikes or pouring hot tar onto the most tender parts of its body.
Between 1842 and 1870, law and order in Hanley was maintained by Staffordshire’s county police force.
Although Hanley and Shelton, the two largest townships in the Potteries, amalgamated in 1857 to form the Borough of Hanley, the borough did not obtain its own police force until 1870.
Stanford Alexander was appointed chief constable. He had 35 police officers to maintain law and order in a town that had a population of 41,000. His officers worked three overlapping shifts, two 12-hour shifts during the day and one nine-hour shift at night. Despite the long hours worked, pay was low. Constables earned 21 shillings a week. Sergeants were paid 25 shillings, and inspectors received 30 shillings.
When Alexander retired in 1875, Herbert Windle was made chief constable. Windle improved pay and working conditions for his officers. He persuaded the town’s Watch Committee to give them a library and a recreation room, with a billiard table, where they could relax when they came off duty.
By the late 1870s, Hanley had become the Potteries’ commercial and cultural centre. Trains and trams brought people from neighbouring towns to its shops and markets, music halls and theatres.
On Saturday nights, Henley’s criminal fraternity made its way to the town centre. Children begged outside shops or stole from market stalls. Drunken brawls broke out in public houses. Gangs roamed the streets looking for a fight. Prostitutes accosted men in Piccadilly. Pickpockets mingled with the crowds in Fountain Square, and robbers lurked in dark alleys waiting to pounce on their victims.
Robbery and theft were indictable offences. They had to be tried in Stafford before the Assize Court or at Quarter Sessions.
Police officers and witnesses were forced to travel to Stafford. They had to wait outside the courtrooms in the Shire Hall until called to give evidence. Unwilling to make the journey, many victims of crime refused to prosecute offenders.
Law and order in Hanley were breaking down. The borough council requested Queen Victoria to grant the town its own Quarter Sessions. She granted the request. The borough’s Quarter Sessions held its first sitting on January 19, 1881. There were eight defendants, three of whom were illiterate.
Note: Law Enforcement in Hanley is one of a series of articles written by Betty Martin before her death. Other articles from the series will be posted from time to time.
Edited: 4th June 2025
North Staffordshire Heritage 