This image 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 philanthropist.
Tell us about neglected and empty buildings in Tunstall which need ‘tender loving’ care and we will include them in our new series Tunstall Today.
You can email us at northstaffordshireheritage@0utlook.com
This image, the first in our new series Tunstall Today, shows how buildings in the town have been neglected for years.
In our image of the old shelter in the Memorial Gardens (The Boulevard), you can see weeds growing on the roof, a gutter that needs repairing and a mural that has been vandalised.
Tell us about other heritage buildings in Tunstall that need ‘tender loving care’ and we will include them in our series.
Email us at northstaffordshireheritage@outlook.com
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 company’s buses, and the 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.
Former soldiers and sailors formed small transport companies that ran bus services bringing customers to Tunstall’s shops and markets from industrial towns and villages on the northern part of the North Staffordshire Coal Field.
The bus services to Tunstall operated by these companies competed with those run by the Potteries Motor Traction Company.
Rowbothams, a transport company whose garage was in Sands Road, Harriseahead, ran a bus service from The Bank, a hamlet in South Cheshire, to Tunstall. Its buses stopped to pick up passengers in Mount Pleasant, Dales Green, The Rookery, Whitehill, Newchapel, Packmoor, Chell and Pitts Hill.
The Potteries Electric Traction Company also operated a service between The Bank and Tunstall although its buses followed a different route.
Buses owned by both companies ran via Mount Pleasant, Dales Green and The Rookery to Whitehill, where their routes diverged at the top of Galley’s Bank. Rowbothans’ buses turned left into Whitehall Road which took them to Newchapel. Buses owned by the Potteries Motor Traction Company turned right into Whitehall Road and went to Tunstall via Kidsgrove, Goldenhill and Sandyford.
Staniers who had a garage in Newchapel was another company whose buses competed with Rowbothams. It ran a service from Mow Cop to Tunstall via Harriseahead, Newchapel, Packmoor, Chell and Pitts Hill.
Tunstall’s Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Wesley Place (now Wesley Street) replaced a chapel built near America Street in the 18th century.
Opened in 1835. the Chapel in Wesley Place was a large brick building with a portico supported by four stone pillars. It could accommodate over 1,000 worshippers and was lit by gas lamps.
In 1838 a Sunday School was erected on land behind the chapel. Five or six years later, a Wesleyan Day School opened in the building. The day school became a Board School in 189o. It closed four years later when Wolstanton School Board opened High Steet Schools.
Tunstall’s windmill was built in a field that people started calling Millfield. A track, which became Temple Street (now Pierce Street), led from America Street to the mill.
The only houses near the mill were three one-story workmen’s cottages.
At one time, a man and his wife lived at the mill. There was a disused mineshaft full of water nearby. One evening the couple had an argument. The wife walked out and did not return. The next morning, her body was found in the mine shaft. She had committed suicide.
When the mill closed, Tunstall’s Drum and Fife band used it as a practice room. The mill was demolished in the mid-1850s.
Did you know that Tunstall’s first Methodist Chapel was built in 1788 by the Wesleyans? The chapel cost £650 and was erected on sloping ground adjacent to ‘the old lane’ that later became America Street. Charles Lawton, a Newcastle builder, and his brother Samson, who came from Tunstall, built the chapel which was forty-five feet long by forty feet wide.
In a pamphlet, called ‘Introduction and Progress of Wesleyan Methodism in Tunstall’ published in 1842, Thomas Leese and Thomas Mores describe John Wesley’s visit to the town’s first Wesleyan Chapel in America Street.
“On March 29th, 1790, Mr Wesley preached in the new chapel at Tunstall, at nine o’clock in the morning, for the first and last time. He was then in his 87th year and died 11 months later, aged 88 years.
“His text on that occasion was ‘Let us go on to perfection.’ There was something very remarkable in his appearance that was calculated to impress the beholder with awe and veneration. Wesley seemed like a messenger from heaven. His pale heavenly countenance and penetrating eye, made him appear as if he was about to be ushered into the company of ‘angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect.’
“Wesley’s voice was weak and feeble, but his expression was clear and distinct. His hearing was remarkable, for although he knew, in general, all the hymns, there were times when he was at a loss for a starting word or two. On these occasions, Mr Joseph Bradford, who travelled with him, whispered the required word to him, which he would immediately catch, and proceed without it being observed by the generality of the congregation.
“He did not use glasses, and it would have been easy for him to have gone through the whole service without either a bible or hymn book.”
Edited by David Martin
Between 1738 and 1800, the township’s population rose from 200 to 800. By 1811 it had risen to 1,677. In 1821, the population was 2,622. Between 1831 and 1841 it increased from 3,673 to 6,979. Tunstall was no longer an industrial village. It had become a town with shops and markets that attracted customers from Butt Lane, Kidsgrove, Mow Cop, Harriseahead, Biddulph, Brindley Ford, Packmoor, Chell and Goldenhill.
During the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution changed the face of Britain, making it the ‘workshop of the world’.
Earthenware factories were built in Tunstall, a township that included Sandyford, Newfield and Furlong. At the end of the 18th century, there were seven factories making pottery. Small coal and ironstone mines were scattered throughout the district. Blue bricks and tiles were produced in the Chatterley Valley.
As early as 1735, William Simpson was making earthenware in the township. By 1750, Enoch Booth had a factory near a field called Stony Croft. The factory made cream coloured ware glazed with a mixture of lead ore and ground flint.
In 1763, Admiral Smith Child built Newfield Pottery, where he produced earthenware. By the 1780s, two brothers, Samuel and Thomas Cartlich, were making pottery and mining coal at Sandyford. There were brick kilns, coal mines, a flint mill and a crate maker’s workshop at Furlong.
During the 1740s, George Booth and his son Thomas, leased a pottery factory on an estate called Will Flats adjacent to Furlong Lane. In 1779, Burslem pottery manufacturer William Adams rented the factory and part of the estate. On 1 March 1784, William bought the factory and the land he was renting. He changed the estate’s name from Will Flats to Greengates. The old factory was demolished, and William built, Greengates, a new factory on the site where he made high quality stoneware and jasper ornaments for the luxury market.
William employed a Swiss modeller, Joseph Mongolot, to help him create the models from which the moulds used to produce the bas-reliefs for jasper and stoneware were made.
Pottery produced by William was sold to wealthy customers. They purchased ware from his showrooms in Fleet Street, London or visited the Greengates factory to buy tea sets, dinner services, jasper, and stoneware ornaments. Â
The 6th edition of William Chaffer’s book ‘Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain’ tells us that some of the jasper made at Greengates was ‘equal, if not superior, to anything made [by Wedgwood] at Etruria.’
North Staffordshire Heritage 