Tag: Oldcourt Street

Joan’s Visit to The Coach and Horses

A Glimpse of Bygone Tunstall

In 1986, Joan Baggaley, who wrote The City of the Six Towns: Stoke-on-Trent and Seven Pillars of Wisdom, visited Tunstall. She had come to see The Coach and Horses, an inn on Oldcourt Street, which overlooked the Chatterley Valley.

On the opposite side of the street, there were houses, bungalows and a school. This side of the street had recently been developed. There were still traces of the terraced houses that had been demolished, along with the cobblestone back entries behind them.

The sun was shining, and Joan looked westward across the valley. In the distance, she saw Bradwell Wood and the hills behind Newcastle.

The inn was open, and Joan was welcomed by the landlady, who took her inside. They went into the lounge, which had been created when two small rooms had been enlarged.

Many years ago, the inn had been a coach house and a resting place for horses. On the north side of the inn, there was a large yard with stables and a hay loft. The stables and the hay loft had been converted into a room where dances and wedding receptions were held. On the east side of the inn was a former school building that was occupied by social services.

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)