Friday, March 06, 2015

Five on Friday

Joining in this week with  Amy and Five on Friday.  Click on the link at the bottom of this post to find others who are joining in too.

I'm going to tell you about five buildings or places in the town most local to where we live.  Longton is one of the six towns which make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent also known as an area as The Potteries.   The other towns are Fenton, Stoke, Hanley, Burslem and Tunstall. Fenton is the town famously ignored by local author Arnold Bennett when he wrote 'Anna of the Five Towns'.   Hanley is now the city centre home to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, the Regent Theatre, the Mitchel Memorial Theatre  and the Intu Shopping Centre plus the other usual high street stores. Stoke is where the main station is, where the Minster is (which I told you about in this post here) it's where the City Council offices are (but not for much longer) and the town from which the city takes its name.  Burslem is known as the Mother town home to the early Wedgwood factories, the famous school of art and the Wedgwood Institute (which I told you about in this post here). Tunstall is the northern most and fourth largest town of the Potteries.  

Longton is known locally as the 'neck-end' apparently one of the reasons given is that the layout of the six towns is, on a map, rather like an inverted bottle oven (see the photo of the Gladstone Museum below for bottle ovens) so Longton or Lane End as it used to be called is the neck end of the bottle.  The other story I have read is that Longton and Lane End were separate towns which eventually became one and that the local term for Lane End was neck-end.

 I was trying to think of five buildings in the town that I see, visit or often pass by, not including the doctor's or dentist's surgeries, the vets', post office or supermarket, which are probably the five buildings I visit most often.  Although one of the places below I probably visit more often than all those - I think you can guess which one.

The photographs below weren't taken recently most of them come from the years 2008 and 2009 and were taken at different times of the year.
  
1. The Town Hall

First building is the Longton Town Hall and the first big building I see as I walk across the road, under the railway bridge and into the town.  It stand on a crossroads know as Times Square where the two thoroughfares of The Strand and Market Street meet.  There are meeting rooms in the town hall and the covered market is behind.  The building we see now was built in 1863 and replaced an earlier building of 1844.  When we first moved here the local people of the town were campaigning to save this building from demolition - as you can see from the photo they succeeded.

2. The Station
Up above the road opposite the town hall is the station.  You can see the railway bridge on the left and the town hall on the right.  There is no longer a station building, just shelters on either platform where the trains run between Derby and Crewe.  I haven't been on a train from here for a year or two now but when we first came to live in the area about 18 years ago the train ran all the way from Skegness to Crewe and once I  travelled all the way to Boston in Lincolnshire on it it was quite a long journey.  The route was then cut to Nottingham to Crewe and now it only goes to Derby.  The station was opened in 1848 by the North Staffordshire Railway Company known locally as 'The Knotty'.

3. The Museum

The Gladstone Pottery Museum is at the opposite end of the town and is known as a Victorian working Museum although there have been potteries on the site since the 18th century owned by the Shelley family and then by William Ward.  The final firing in the pottery works was in 1960 and the site was due for demolition but was saved at the 11th hour when it was purchased by the owner of H & R Johnson tiles and given to the Staffordshire Pottery Industry Preservation Trust to be run as a museum.  It was opened in 1974 by The Duke of Gloucester.  In 1994 the Gladstone Museum became the property of the City Council.  Here is a link to the post I wrote about the Museum in August 2009.

4. The Church

Close to the Museum is the parish church of St James the Less built in 1833/34 to serve the growing populations in the towns of Lane End and Longton.

 5. The Library

Yes, this is the building I visit most often!  The library is housed in what was known as The Sutherland Institute.  The building was completed in 1898 on land given by the Duke of Sutherland who lived nearby in Trentham Hall.  It was a technical school or college which supported workers' education in the local industries of ceramics, coal and steel and a free library.


28 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Hello Lisa and thank you for your comment. I've just visited your blog and tried to leave a comment but it keeps asking me to 'log in' so I'm afraid I can't leave you a message to say how delicious your lemon cake looks. I hope you pop back sometime and read this so you can see why I haven't returned your comment. Rosiex

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  2. That's a grand looking library Rosie! It is good that the Town Hall and the Museum were saved from demolition. So many buildings were demolished near me in the 1970's but my dad had the foresight to photograph them before they were pulled down, one being a beautiful imposing house called Willington lodge. It is good when old buildings can be saved and utilised in some way. Have a happy weekend. x

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    1. How wonderful that your Dad had the vision and foresight to take all those photos of buildings that have been lost. For every building saved in this area many more have been lost I'm afraid including many terraced houses formerly lived in by the pottery workers which if they had been refurbished could have offered good solid accommodation for many people. Happy weekend to you too:)

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  3. What a great tour of the town with photos!x

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    1. Thank you Michelle - as with Lisa - above - I'm having problems leaving a comment on your blog because when I try to publish a comment google want me to join google plus which I don't want to do. I hope you pop back sometime and read this and understand why I haven't been able to leave a coment with you:)

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  4. Thank you. I can't get to the Potteries in person, so am enjoying your tour. Please do one for Hanley & Stoke, see if I recognise anything from time as a kid up there with my Grandparents. Where does Newcastle fit with all these? We used to go to Newcastle market quite a bit. Still remember buying maroon moccasin slippers. I loved them (aged 12/13). Katharine x

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    1. I'll try to do a bit about each town you mention over the next few months, Katherine. Newcastle isn't part of the unitary authority of the City of Stoke -on-Trent. The Newcastle-under-Lyme council covers the area west and North of the city so also covers Keele and Kidsgrove. Newcastle does have a very lively open air market and also a bric a brac and artisans farmers market too. The little museum there is a treasure. I think I have written a post about that somewhere on here but I will get around to writing another soon:)

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  5. It was nice to read that your towns people's efforts to save these historical sites succeeded more than once! It's always such a shame to demolition beautiful old buildings. Love the shape of the pottery ovens. I'd be at the library every day if it was housed in such an elegant home ;) (ours is quite modern, but still nice!)
    Wendy

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    1. Thanks, Wendy - although much of Stoke's industry has been lost over the years and therefore many buildings too there are certain buildings that have been saved by locals and also recently places like Middleport pottery and the Wedgwood Institute by the Princes Trust:)

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  6. I don't know your part of the world very well so it was interesting to see what it has to offer in the form of some fine buildings. I thought you were going to say that the supermarket was the place you visited most often - silly me.

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    1. Oh, Elaine sorry to confuse you - you'd think it would be the supermarket but I have to say we don't visit the town supermarket that often because it is always so busy and such a hassle - so we drive a little way to the next town to the one we prefer hence not visiting the local one as often as the library:)

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  7. I see the library the most as I drive past it! Live on the same road lol We do have some wonderful buildings. Longton town centre might not be the best design/place, but I tend to look upwards and the original architecture is still there above the shops. Great post Rosie.

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    1. Ah, yes it is best to look up when walking in some places in the town as I get so sad to see the still empty shop fronts especially along Market street and in the precinct. I don't really know how things could be altered - it would be lovely to see a thriving town buzzing with locals and visitors:)

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  8. Glad they were able to preserve so many of the buildings instead of tearing them down. I only visit my library online, I'm terrible about turning books in on time, so much easier when I can do it electronically

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    1. Ah, yes returning books before they get overdue can sometimes be a pain - I can renew on-line as long as no one else has requested the book:)

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  9. Fabulous idea for a post!!! It was great to see the different buildings and to learn some more about them. The pottery museum must be a really interesting place to visit. This is a good reminder to look around us at the different buildings! Thank you so much for joining in. I hope that you have a great weekend!! xx

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    1. Thanks, Amy - the Gladstone Museum is fascinating to visit - they also have a history of toilets gallery and a tile one too as well as the old factory buildings and hand-on on the potter's wheel:)

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  10. Oh those buildings! All so different and all fantastic. My favourite has to be the pottery museum. Have a wonderful weekend xx

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    1. Thanks, Chel - the pottery museum is wonderful - happy weekend to you too:)

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  11. I lived in the Potteries when I was young. What I remember is how black the buildings were, particularly in Etruria where they were literally black almost as if they had been painted. A few bottle kilns were still standing in ruins (they were pretty black too) I think the wonderful oatcake shops had gone when I revisited many years later. Do they still have oatcakes? they were really nice, like pancakes. We used to eat them toasted.

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    1. Yes, they still have oatcakes and oatcake shops. The old 'hole-in-the-wall' oatcake shop closed a few years ago there was a great debate about trying to save it but it didn't work out. I think there is a national oatcake day for Staffordshire Oatcakes. A lot of the buildings you remember have probably been cleaned up or are no longer there. Etruria where the Wedgwood factory and model village used to be before moving to Barlaston became the site of the Garden Festival in the 1980s and it is now a retail and leisure park also a marina for the canal boats as the Trent & Mersey canal runs through there:)

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  12. It's lovely to see photos of an area of the country that I don't know very well. Jx

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    1. Thanks, Jan - glad you enjoyed the photos:)

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  13. My favourite building is the museum - so distinctive. I still need to do a tour of Stoke xxxx

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    1. Tour Guide ready and available for duty when you visit the Potteries:)xxx

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  14. I love the look of that museum too, must try and go one day. x

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    1. It's well worth a visit, Suzy, there's so much of interest there:)

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