Stoke me up: my potty pilgrimage to Britain’s ceramic capital

I love ceramics. Not so much ancient-pots-and-medieval-fragments ceramics, but more trinkets-and-figurines ceramics, because I like to imagine where I’d put them in the make-believe mansion I live in in my dreams. It’s really just shopping. So when the British Ceramics Biennial invited me up to Stoke-on-Trent, the UK’s pottery capital, for a weekend, how could I refuse? I had long wanted to take the pottery pilgrimage to Staffordshire.

The journey from London Euston to Stoke-on-Trent was easy, and Avanti West Coast trains, in spite of their bad rep for timekeeping, have a Eurostar feel about them. I sat across from a couple who were wrestling with their one-year-old and pleading with him that “we don’t hit”. From the amount of hitting he was doing, Harry definitely does hit. An hour and a half later, we all got off, shellshocked.

Something I didn’t know about Stoke-on-Trent is that it is made up of six towns: Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke, and Tunstall. This means that the city’s dozens of potteries, pottery museums, and factory shops are spread far and wide, and don’t – as I had assumed – form a kind of one-site Pottery Disneyland. I had imagined the potteries would be like Charlie’s chocolate factory: a vast industrial complex with different whimsical wings dedicated to different potteries, with a malevolent ceramic overlord moralistically drowning a child in a river of Spode slip, turning another into a giant Royal Doulton jug, and throwing a third into a Moorcroft furnace, all while being cheered on by a crowd of singing, miniature Josiah Wedgwoods. But no. Instead of visiting a singular pottery palace, I would be travelling across the city for my ceramic kicks.

The Ceramics Biennial, my first stop, is held inside the old Spode Works, spread through six spaces inside the factory site, each room with its own historic charms and industrial quirks. The factory was acquired by Josiah Spode in 1776 and produced Spode wares continuously until 2008. Even though the Biennial is totally free to enter, there was a behind-the-scenes feel. Maybe this is what it would be like seeing Oasis in Manchester, or the Beatles in Liverpool. This is ceramics playing with a Home Turf advantage. Every corner of the site was filled with ceramic delights, including a brilliant set of pots made by Johnny Vegas in collaboration with sculptor Emma Rodgers which definitely drew a crowd. Born under an hour away, in another city with a rich ceramic history, St Helens, Vegas’ involvement is a love letter to the region’s industrial past, as well as a gift to current visitors: part of his and Rogers’ installation is a vertical wall filled with clay, which viewers are invited to touch, smear, and pull apart. Next to it, an avenue is formed by two rows of pots made by the duo, partially caved-in, having been placed between two embracing bodies before drying. Vegas and Rogers’ work gives visitors permission to let it out, and then bring it in.

All of work on display was playful and beautiful, with viewers gasping at the intricate, impossibly delicate, floral details of Charlotte Moore’s freestanding ceramic gateway, and at Krzysztof Strzelecki’s semi-hard ceramic cock which viewers crouched to catch a glimpse of through a discreet peep hole hidden within his beautiful figurative design.

After scouting out a highly recommended toastie, the next stop was World of Wedgwood, down in Barlaston just outside of Trentham. Set in a large rural estate owned by Wedgwood, the complex includes several buildings including the Wedgwood Factory (where you can go on a tour but I didn’t have the time) and the V&A Wedgwood Collection. The V&A building was as sleek as expected, with beautiful, curving cabinets leading you around the loop of the museum, well-thought through interactive elements for kiddies, and a particularly gorgeous free-standing 18th-century folly filled with busts illuminating the history of The Grand Tour (the Enlightenment-era equivalent of lads going to ‘Shagaluf’). I was amazed by how beautifully the collection had been curated and how wonderful it was that visitors could see all this for free. Then I headed to the gift-shop: this is where they getcha.

By this time the heavens had opened, and the 100 Bus I had arrived on wasn’t scheduled to come back in the other direction for another 55 minutes, so I treated myself to an Uber ride to Emma Bridgewater. After all, I had just shown the self restraint not to buy a heavily discounted ‘2023’ Wedgwood bauble, so I had effectively saved myself £45 (this is the kind of financial maths that promises one day to end my marriage).

My stop at Emma Bridgewater, in Hanley, was brief, because the site doesn’t have a tourable route you can potter around (which isn’t a pun because “to potter” comes from the Old English “potian” meaning to “poke”, rather than “pottery” – who knew?). Had it been a weekday I could have booked on to a factory tour, and had I had the foresight to book anything at all, I could have had a go at painting some pottery myself in their workshop. I walked ten minutes around the corner to The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke’s largest museum. The ground floor contains the oldest part of Stoke-on-Trent’s historical collection, including Pre-historic and Roman archaeological finds as well as the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever discovered. I bypassed this and headed straight for the Ceramics Gallery, not to be distracted from my Pottery Mission – sorry, Staffordshire Hoard!

A major expansion in the late 1970s made The Potteries Museum feel eerily similar to my secondary school building. But its collection was spectacular – completely, joyously, all over the shop. In one cabinet, an ancient Cypriot jug dating to 700-500 BC stood next to a set of 1900s salesroom examples of bathroom sanitary ware, including a teeny tiny urinal (eat / wee your heart out, Duchamp). Around the corner a mammoth complex of cabinets holding hundreds of cow-shaped creamer jugs, some more cow-like than others. Next to it was a display of tin-glazed ceramics, including a large plate of King William III, and Queen Mary, who had both nips spilling out of her bodice. Perhaps if the monarchy wants to be more popular, they should take a leaf out of Mary’s book… Looking into each of the cabinets reminded me of childhood train journeys with my mum where we would flip through the pages of magazines, each picking “one thing you’d have if you could” on each page. (I’d hang Queen Mary over my bed like a boudoir photo, and I would only drink liquids that had been poured out of the cow).

I’d ceramics-ed myself out for the day, and headed back to my hotel. But as I walked I spotted a group who I initially assumed were a stag do: one was dressed as a 1920s flapper, one a circus strong man, one in an 18th century powdered wig, and another in a yellow chicken onesie. Then I remembered that the BCB team had mentioned that there was a mural unveiling happening tonight, as part of the ‘100 Years 100 Faces’ celebrations to mark the centenary of Stoke-on-Trent’s city status. So I set out to find the bash.

When I arrived in the Marsh Street car park, I couldn’t tell whether I was early or late. The mural, a collage of 100 notable local figures from Stoke’s past and present, was fully viewable, but there were only a handful of people milling about. Maybe I had missed it. But just as I considered heading back to the hotel, a procession emerged from around the corner, led by a saxophonist, two stilt walkers, the costumed group I’d seen earlier, and around 200 people who snaked into the car park to much fanfare.

It felt like being someone’s +1 to a wedding where you don’t know the couple, as I stood towards the back like a voyeur with a kink for public art. But, sometimes, it’s at the weddings where you don’t know anyone that the speeches are the most moving. The energy was electric as speakers took to the stage to explain what it had taken to get this mural project off the ground, the history of the potteries, and how proud everyone was to be from Stoke-on-Trent. I wanted to be from Stoke-on-Trent. The mural was illuminated with a wonderful, extensive fireworks display and a light show, guiding us through the Stokie characters who had been honoured with their likeness, including former World’s Strongest Man Eddie Hall, influencer Luke Hamnett, and singer-turned-artist Robbie Williams.

As I watched couples hold each other in their arms, children “oohing” and “ahhing” at the fireworks display, and friends smiling at the stories we were being told of the people who made Stoke great and who Stoke has made great, I began to cry. That afternoon, it had been reported that 150,000 right wing protestors had marched through central London, donning cruelly co-opted St George’s flags, and spewing hateful bile in the name of “patriotism”. But what I was witnessing in Stoke-on-Trent – this celebration of unity and shared history – is what real pride looks like. Real pride doesn’t exclude, it brings people in. It can’t wait to share itself with you.

I went back to my hotel with a full heart.

The next morning it was an early start to get to the Middleport Pottery, the last stop on my tour, before catching my train back south. I’m pleased I did my potteries tour in this order because, inadvertently, I think I saved the best until last. The canalside pottery, which is now also home to multiple studios for contemporary potters, has beautifully preserved its Victorian spaces. For an £8 fee, you can explore the circular ‘Heritage Route’ through the site, armed with a fob that opens up these paid-for areas (the fob makes you feel very powerful). One of my favourite areas was the Mould Store, where they keep over a thousand moulds which would have been used for slip casting. The room was like a sweet shop, if all of the sweet jars were opaque and white and empty, and some of them had the protruding, ghostly face of Winston Churchill poking out instead of a label. I loved walking through the narrow corridors, spotting the collected cast of A Christmas Carol, several Shakespearean leading ladies, and the Quaker Oats guy.

But perhaps the crowning moment of my trip was standing inside their 137-year-old bottle oven; a large brick, coal-fired construction for firing ceramics, made from two bottle-shaped chambers, one inside the other. I’m not a meditation person but had a real urge to sit on the floor and enjoy the dark quiet of this industrial womb. I didn’t, because I might have been asked to leave, but it felt sacred in a way I can’t quite pin down. Perhaps it was the dark, or the quiet, or the otherworldliness of the architecture. Maybe I just wanted a sit down. Before I left to catch my train I allowed myself one last loop through the heritage route, stopping to enjoy the cool autumn sun over the canal.

As I listen to yet more news unfurl on the radio about fascist violence, I keep coming back to the memory of the ‘100 Years 100 Faces’ celebration. Stoke does pride right; if only we could adopt this on a national scale.