A timely new PhD thesis, in part a study of post-medieval soup kitchens in Staffordshire including around five pages in total relating to the Potteries. Public and available for download.

Also reveals the origins of the well-known Soup Kitchen, in Stafford town centre…

Thomas Salt, a banker, founded Stafford’s soup kitchen as part of a ‘house of charity’ that provided lodging, clothing, and food to the poor, with an area to sit and eat. Salt’s son, Sir Thomas Salt MP, handed the institution over to a committee in 1865 which then ran the institution on a subscription basis [i.e. local people undertook a sort of early crowd-funding to sustain the service]. In 1868 it limited its ambition to soup. It opened all year unlike most other soup kitchens; its premises remain in use today as a restaurant called The Soup Kitchen.

I’m fairly sure it’s also still run by a charitable body.