Category: Stoke-on-Trent

Tunstall Memorial Gardens

An Open Letter From Lee Wanger (10 November 2024)
The Pavilion in the Memorial Gardens

I want to draw your attention to the plight of Tunstall’s Memorial Gardens in The Boulevard.

If you haven’t visited the gardens recently, please go and see for yourself how they have been neglected.

While nearly every town has a war memorial, Tunstall’s Memorial Gardens are unique. They are a heritage asset we should be proud of. The gardens are the focal point of a Conservation Area and home to our cenotaph.

My attempts to get Stoke-on-Trent City Council to look after the gardens failed. I consulted heritage lawyers and asked them if there was anything else I could do. They told me my only choice was to shame the council into action. Will you add your voice to mine? Can we work together and ask the council to restore our Memorial Gardens before it is too late?

The pavilion shown in the image has been left to rot. Fires and graffiti have damaged the murals, bricks have been knocked out of the walls and the guttering is collapsing.

The ornate entrance gates and fencing in The Boulevard are rotting away. Finials are missing from the tops of pillars, and the fencing is rusting and disintegrating.

For a long time, I have been asking the council to restore the gardens to their former glory. My requests have been ignored. Now, I need your help. Please write to the City Council, your local Councillor, and your Member of Parliament. Tell them about the plight of the Memorial Gardens. These gardens are of great historical significance. Ask them to stop the neglect and save the gardens.

Many thanks for reading my letter. Best wishes, Lee Wanger

Stoke-on-Trent’s Proud Heritage

A city that forgets its past is a city without a future.
Reginald Mitchell’s Spitfire

Stoke-on-Trent is a city with a proud heritage.

Its history is a testament to people from the Potteries who have played significant roles on the world stage. 

Stoke-on-Trent’s city council was one of the pioneers of comprehensive education. It defied Conservative and Labour governments to reform secondary education by creating comprehensive schools and a sixth-form college. 

Local art schools, technical schools and colleges of further education were progressive centres of excellence. Reginald Mitchell, who designed the Spitfire, turned down a place at Birmingham University. He wanted to serve an apprenticeship with a firm in Fenton and study engineering at city technical schools. 

By the early 1930s, the North Staffordshire Technical College was a university in everything but name. The college’s worldwide reputation in ceramic research and mining engineering attracted students from Europe, North America and the Commonwealth.

Some argue that the past is dead. They are mistaken. It lives in our collective memory and shapes our destiny. Our city’s proud heritage tells us who we are and why we are unique. A city that forgets its past is a city without a future.

Can You Help Trace These Film Strips?

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

A Tunstall Church Could Help Create a World Heritage Site

The Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Tunstall, designed by Father Patrick Ryan and built by unemployed men could help make North Staffordshire’s Industrial Heritage Landscape a World Heritage Site.

The Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Tunstall is one of Stoke-on-Trent’s hidden jewels.

Architectural historians believe it will help make North Staffordshire’s Industrial Landscape a World Heritage Site. The parish priest, Father Patrick Ryan, designed the church, which was built between 1922 and 1930 by unemployed men.

The Gladstone Pottery Museum

The Gladstone Pottery Museum is one of Stoke-on-Trent’s heritage assets. It will help make North Staffordshire’s Industrial Landscape a World Heritage Site.

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.

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