Potteries Post launched

by futurilla

Right, the The Potteries Post is now launched and primed. Have at it, and please spread the word to those puzzled at why the Creative Stoke / Wild Stoke etc Groups have had to cease on Facebook.

When the RSS feed is viewed in a proper Web browser (e.g. Pale Moon) it can be read downward by eye, with most of the body-text included for each post…

The advantage of a blog over Facebook (or Twitter), is that it’s far more public and (eventually) gets into the keyword search-engines.

Potteries Post

by futurilla

I’ve retro-fitted my old hyperlocal ‘good news from Stoke’ blog site with a new template and renamed it The Potteries Post. Seems as good a name as any, and doesn’t appear to conflict. Nothing to see there at present except the old 2018 items. But it will start to fill with the items I was previously posting on my Facebook Groups. Submit your own news by adding a comment, which will be held for moderation and consideration as before.

Leaving Facebook

by futurilla

Facebook locked my account last night, and the 11th March 2022 deadline for response has already passed.

Looks like I have no choice but to leave Facebook.

This affects the large Facebook Groups ‘Creative Stoke’, ‘Wild Stoke’, ‘History of Stoke-on-Trent’, and the smaller groups ‘Folklore and Tales of North Staffordshire’, and ‘Pottering Around’.

I’ll be looking at alternative options today.

Meades on Burslem

by futurilla

Jonathan Meades, mentioning Burslem in the latest edition of The Oldie magazine…

“[…] George ‘Metz’ Robinson, whose masterpiece, Burslem Town Hall, is not Gothic. It is not even ‘Modern Gothic’. It is ur-Victorian and belongs to no known school [of architectural design]. [‘Metz’ became a newspaper art critic, but as a journalist in his younger years] he was sent to cover the Franco-Prussian War and was banged up in Metz during the siege – hence his nickname.” [He and his fellow] artists were outsiders – not part of the web of local [municipal architectural] practitioners who, decade after decade, have questionably enjoyed the bulk of municipal and commercial patronage [and who as a class came to be so corrupt both financially and aesthetically in the 1960s and 70s. Robinson can be compared to the men of later 19th-century Birmingham, who in architecture] “developed an idiom that has no peer in England [and who succeeded in making] Birmingham unique in its creation of an arts-and-crafts urbanism” […] “It can hardly be labelled a movement, but there is an undeniable accord between buildings of different types and uses.”

His article is actually on Birmingham but, as usual with such things, south Birmingham relentlessly hogs all the limelight. The article never strays north of the city-centre’s Broad Street. There’s a whole other north Birmingham up there, about which a young Meades admirer might make a Meades-like video series.

Bernard Hollowood

by futurilla

Add one to the ‘famous people from Burslem’ lists.

Bernard Hollowood (1910-1981), born in Burslem, became a cartoonist and then the editor of Punch magazine from 1957 through 1968. The magazine is forgotten now except among the over-70s, but Punch was then the leading British humour and spot-cartoon magazine of the post-war period.

Where is ‘The Forest of Mercia’ – the map

by futurilla

I had to search long and hard for this. An actual map of the area covered by the ‘Forest of Mercia’. The area starts below the ‘Chase’ bit of Cannock Chase, and runs down to just north of the urban rim of Wolverhampton, and then also runs south a bit around the city.

They’re currently one of the partners in DEFRA’s new £12.1m national tree-planting boost, and as part of that are locally delivering planting into early 2022… “a mixture of small-scale planting, some on school grounds and others on larger scale public open space. Native trees and shrubs will be planted … Some sites have also been identified for the planting of orchards”.

The Potteries in the year of the Great Exhibition – extract

by futurilla

From “The Potteries in the year of the Great Exhibition”, issued as a 28 page booklet by the Festival Committee of the Council of the City of Stoke-on-Trent, to mark the Festival of Britain in 1952.

The paragraph below was part of a short extract published at the back of the Festival brochure. Here edited for clarity, sense and errors.

“The traveller [when walking from Stoke to Hanley in the year 1851], once off the main thoroughfare [in Stoke town], was almost immediately in open country. After passing the railway bridge [at the top of] Liverpool Road, Stoke, he would walk towards Hanley along a main road with green fields on either side, flanked by trees and hedgerows with cattle and sheep grazing right [down the hill] to the point where the Station Road ‘bus stop stands now. Directly opposite stood the isolated house known as Winton Villa (still visible from the railway bridge [to those travelling on a train, but] now built around by N.C.B. [National Coal Board] offices). [This Villa was] then the abode of Robert Garner1 one of the early surgeons attached to what is now the Royal Infirmary (but which was then situated [nearby] in Etruria Vale). The fields later consecrated as the [Hanley] Cemetery rose above the hollow lane which became Stoke Road. Blackberry bushes grew at its side. The [road to Hanley rose to cross the line of the Cauldon canal (1779) which] flowed by tall trees in which magpies nested (which gave the name to [nearby] Pynest Street). [As the traveller crested the final rise into Hanley he looked back west and saw] The valley [spread out below. This was] watered by the Fowlea [Brook] and was very pretty — the waters clear, sweet and full of fish. In the meadows along its banks, even beside the new railway, the shepherd still guarded his flocks.”

1. As well as a leading local medical man, Robert Garner was one of the founders of what became the North Staffordshire Field Club. In old age he became ‘The Father of the Club’.