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.