Re-Form Heritage, a Stoke-based charity that owns Middleport Pottery, is getting money to help save dilapidated buildings in Stoke-on-Trent.
The money from the Architectural Heritage Fund’s Heritage Development Trust will help to preserve historic buildings and kick-start the regeneration of key heritage sites in the Potteries.
This sketch depicts the Golden Cross, a well-known London coaching inn, as it was in the middle of the 18th century. The inn dates from the 17th century and was at Charing Cross. During the 18th and 19th centuries, stage coaches ran from the Golden Cross to the Potteries. The inn features in Charles Dickens’s novels David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers.
A bookseller, James Strapham, opened Hanley’s first library in 1790.
Called the Pottery Subscription Library, the library was a commercial venture which James ran from his bookshop. He charged customers two guineas to join the library and a guinea a year to borrow books.
In 1796, James sold the bookshop and the library to John Allbut, whose son Thomas acquired them at the beginning of the 19th century. Thomas ran the library until he retired on December 31st, 1852 when its books were transferred to the Mechanics Institution’s library in Gitana Street.
Shortly afterwards, the Mechanics Institution left Gitana Street and moved to new premises in Pall Mall.
North Staffordshire Heritage 