The Full English by Stuart Maconie

Author:Stuart Maconie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-03-11T13:39:28+00:00

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‘Soft as the earth is mankind, and both need to be altered,’ said W H Auden, a keen student of geology. The people of North Staffordshire have been altering their earth and being shaped by it for half a millenium. The history of the Potteries is built on a seam of coal and clay. This thick subterranean ribbon that runs across North Staffordshire gives up (with no small effort) the long-burning, high flame yield coal that’s needed for firing pottery ovens. Add to that the thick layers of yellow clay and red marl just two feet below the surface, all the way from Burslem to Hanley, and Mother Nature has done her bit for Stoke here. This is the perfect geological combination for pottery making, arguably the most enduring art form of the last 5,000 years of human history. To understand why, try drinking from a cave painting. Pottery is human culture’s most satisfying blend of aesthetics and practicality. ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be beautiful or believe to be useful,’ said William Morris. The best ceramics are both.

North Staffordshire folk were making pots a long time before Josiah Wedgwood came on the scene, but it was his drive and innovation that made the Potteries great and Stoke-on-Trent the ceramics capital of the world. Born into a family of potters, he was not just a craftsman but a savvy businessman and technical pioneer. Wedgwood built a grand home and a technically advanced factory in 1769 and named them both Etruria after the Italian region that was home to the mysterious and artistic Etruscan folk. Here I could possibly outline what little I understand about Wedgwood’s technical innovations; how he divided the Etruria works into discreet sections of slip house, clay making workshop, biscuit kilns, glost placing and firing in order to improve efficiency. But unless you have clay in your blood, I fear your eyes would glaze over as smoothly and blandly as one of Josiah’s old creamware jugs. Suffice to say that Tristram Hunt, former Labour MP for Stoke, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Wedgwood’s biographer has called him ‘the Steve Jobs of the eighteenth century.’ By this I think he meant a tireless innovator and entrepreneur. But unlike Jobs, Wedgwood was also a progressive radical, an abolitionist, an anti-colonialist and forerunner of the Chartists in many of his egalitarian ideals.

The Etruria works were demolished in the mid twentieth century. But handily for me, the Etruria Industrial Museum on the Caldon Canal, which fetched and carried Wedgwood’s output in hundreds of boats a week during its heyday, is firing up the venerable machinery on a rare open day during my visit. First, I have to find it. I make heavy weather of this to be honest, pootling around in the streets behind the University of Staffordshire building with a dodgy connection on Google Maps. In the 30s, when Priestley came, this was Staffordshire Polytechnic, elevated to university status in that

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