The filmstrip ‘The Township of Tunstall’, last seen in the 1990s, was shown again last Saturday in Tunstall Town Hall.
Made by Highgate School in 1960, the filmstrip depicts life in the town during the 19th century and features images of historic buildings that have been demolished. Members of the audience were introduced to Anglo-Saxon Tunstall and told about the lives of Sir Smith Child and John Nash Peake.
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)
North Staffordshire Heritage 