After more than a century of debate, definitive scientific proof on links between Cornwall and the ancient Mediterranean. “How Britain’s long-distance tin trade transformed the Bronze Age”…

“Published in the journal Antiquity, the results provide the first concrete evidence that Cornwall and Devon were major suppliers of tin for bronze production in the ancient world. […] British tin was traded up to [2,500 miles away by] around 1300 BC. […] The research team at Durham [University], in collaboration with European institutions, used chemical and isotope analyses” of metal found in ancient shipwrecks. (My emphasis).

Which of course doesn’t endorse far-fetch notions that ancient Phoenician traders were rocking up for a tour of Stonehenge, or that the young Jesus had an uncle in the long-distance tin-trade and thus walked inland and over to Glastonbury. But at least it overturns any previous scepticism on the trade.

New on LibriVox, a free public domain audiobook of the book Needwood Forest (1776)…

Francis Noel Clarke Mundy […] describes the forest’s natural beauty, its flora and fauna, and the various activities that take place within its boundaries. […] Mundy’s writing style is descriptive and poetic, and he captures the essence of the forest in vivid detail.

More poppycock proposals from our dismal Labour government. They’re set to force canal narrowboats to rip out… “diesel engines, petrol generators and wood-fired stoves”, and also plan to slam boat-owners with big “tax rises on marine fuel”. Plus all… “new boats will be required to be entirely electric.”

Not going to go down well among boaters on the Trent & Mersey and Cauldon canals through Stoke, and likely to remove a lot of the more traditional ‘woodsmoke’ narrowboats that walkers and visitors like to see on our local canals.

The Telegraph newspaper spoke about the news to the…

“National Association of Boat Owners, [whose spokesman] cautioned that replacing diesel engines and generators on canal boats would be impractical [and] could trigger a wave of homelessness, as people who lived on canal boats because of the high cost of housing would be unable to afford an enforced switch to electric power. “No way they could do it,” said Mr Braybrook. “They’d be forced off the water, off their off-grid lifestyle, and probably into homelessness.”

Wormwoodiana goes exploring a nearby rarity, a rail-accessible town with four good second-hand bookshops, in “Exploring Shrewsbury’s Second-Hand Bookshops”.

A key part of Burslem is to get a £1.25m refurb. The £1.25m will fund Queen Street being dug up and re-laid with ‘anywhere’ paving, with trees planted. Not sure there’s really room for large trees, but they’re going to squeeze some in.

The new paving will also continue up the Brick House (aka Brickhouse or Cock’s Yard) pedestrian alleyway that goes through to the Town Hall, and there will be an unspecified “cleaning and refurbishment of Swan Square”, presumably the bit at the east end of Queen Street by the traffic lights.

It all looks horribly modern, forcing the place into being a naff ‘same as everywhere else’ retail plaza. That’s not what you should be doing with somewhere as historic as Burslem.

Coming soon, the Great British Spring Clean, 21st March to 6th April (although note that the weather / wind is fine for it now, and may not be then).

Best place to get the best ‘Helping Hand’ litter picking-stick in Stoke, in person, is the AbleWorld superstore on the edge of Hanley. Sadly the sticks can’t be sent to Amazon lockers because they’re too long, though you can sometimes ‘Click and Collect’ via eBay. Stoke Council may be able to supply residents with sticks and also branded bags, or at least I’ve heard they have in the past. Not sure now, what with the bankruptcy/cuts and a likely high springtime demand.

New and free on Archive.org, Jim Foley’s A Uttoxeter Treasure Trove At Your Finger Tips: A List Of Books, Publications, Photo Collections On The History And Heritage Of Uttoxeter (2025). With a focus on family history research.

A future edition might also usefully note the 140+ postcards of “Uttoxeter” on Postcards from Stoke.

Just announced, £150,000 of National Lottery cash for the Potteries… “to celebrate centenary of local cultural icon Arthur Berry”. To include… “two local public exhibitions of Arthur’s artworks”. Sounds good.

An interesting curiosity, Hand Drawn Map of Anglo-Saxon Southern Derbyshire & North East Staffordshire, drawn from the data in the Domesday Book. Prints are currently being sold by the map-maker on eBay (no website or blog, but it appears he might be contacted via Reddit or eBay messaging). Regrettably it only starts at Stapenhill and is way too far over toward Derby for my interests, but some readers may be interested.

The Historic and Botanic Garden Training Programme, now open for 2025 at the Trentham Estate in Stoke-on-Trent. ‘Estate’ is different from the ‘Gardens’, but it is a Garden Training programme. So I guess you’d also spend time in the garden parts. Application details for trainees are here. Selection appears to be based on merit and ability, rather than political criteria.

A statue of the singer Lemmy, of the band Motörhead, is to be erected in Burslem in May 2025. The statue is by Andy Edwards, who I recall has done a lot of Stoke-on-Trent’s new statues in the past 20 years. He’s sculpting it in local clay, and it will be on a tall sandstone plinth. On the east side of the old Town Hall, just over the road from the Queens Theatre with its back to the main road, apparently. £11k has so far been raised by crowd-funding of the £50k cost.

New on eBay, a trade token (‘unofficial farthing’) revealing the name of a Stoke bookseller and printer.

Apparently in the book Unofficial Farthings, 1820-1870, so that gives the broad date-range. In the 1840s he was a printer in the High Street, Stoke-upon-Trent and published engraved Views in the Potteries. A “William Dean” was owner of the Staffordshire Potteries Telegraph newspaper, which produced 125 issues from 1852 to 1855, which seems likely. The Engineer (June 1865) later reported that a “WILLIAM DEAN, Stafford Street, Longton” in Stoke-on-Trent had been given leave to proceed with a patent application for a method of printing from wood-blocks.