If Pots Could Talk... The Staffordshire Potteries Tour

 On Wednesday, I went on an SHA tour of the Staffordshire Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent. It was awesome!! The Staffordshire area has been a pottery-making district for 300+ years. It is the perfect place for making pottery because the area is rich in high-temperature burning coal, water, and clay. Most of the factories have been torn down today because they contributed to pollution- but at one time there were over 200 kilns in Stoke-on-Trent. The only standing kilns are at the Gladstone Pottery Museum. Those kilns were slated for destruction too, but at the last minute money was donated to preserve them and turn the factory into a museum.

These are the kilns and inner courtyard of the factory. The kilns have a very distinctive bottle shape- they taper towards the top to release the smoke. Of course 200 kilns like this lead to the terrible pollution that the industrial revolution in England is famous for. Life was hard in these factories- the average age at death was 46. The pottery workers ground flint to use in the factories- as they ground the flint, small silica flakes would fly into the air and be inhaled into the workers lungs. Eventually this lead to a deadly disease called Silicosis. Children as young as six worked in these factories. Most were orphans who would have ended up in a work house if they hadn't found a job at the potteries. 

This is one of the potters wheels. The potter would sit at the wheel in the far right of the picture. He would have a partner, usually a young girl, who would turn the crank to make the wheel spin. She would work at the crank for twelve hours a day on average. Deformities were common due to long hours of repetitive motion during the growing years.

We attended several pottery making demonstrations while we were at the museum. We watched a potter throw a pot, a woman making small clay sculptures by pouring slip into a mold, a woman hand-make bone china flowers, and a painter painting pottery. The potters doing the demonstrations were all incredibly skilled. 

This is the machine that would cast plates into the right shape. They look like UFO's! The plate sits on top of a tray- so what you are looking at is an upside down plate on the firing tray. I have a lot more pictures from this tour, so I think I'll break them up into multiple posts.