Stoke-on-Trent Audio Tour: Fired Earth

Stoke proper — a square kilometre between the Minster, the Spode works, the station, and the canal — was the engine room of the British ceramics industry. This tour is not about the great potters' families. It is about the throwers and paintresses, the kiln-firers and flint-grinders, the navvies who cut the canal and the boatmen who legged through Harecastle in the dark, the railwaymen who carried the finished ware south and the hotel staff who fed and housed them. It is about Potter's Rot, the workers' cottages Josiah Spode II built at minimum standard in Penkhull Square, the named casualties on the North Staffordshire Railway's war memorial, and the memorial school that Herbert Minton's workers' skills paid for.