A provisional timeline of the arts in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. With an initial focus on the visual arts, institutions and groups, and major turning points.<\/strong><\/p>\n
Started: 5th August 2014. Last updated: 30th August 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n 1690s: The Eler brothers<\/strong> arrive in the Bradwell Wood, Stoke-on-Trent, to secretly use its fine red clay to develop new types of redware pottery.<\/p>\n 1750s: Longton Hall<\/strong>, near Lane End, Longton, becomes the earliest known commercial pottery of modern times that was worked on a factory system. Worked 1749-1760, seemingly by a three-man team, and before it closed down it produced the famously exuberant \u201cLongton Hall Porcelain\u201d with surreal designs.<\/p>\n 1759: Josiah Wedgwood<\/strong> sets up in business in the Potteries. Artists and intellectuals, often highly eccentric, begin to form a small cluster around his growing Etruria Works and on the nearby Fowlea Bank (now the quiet lane that runs behind the Basford Bank).<\/p>\n 1786: Josiah Wedgwood succeeds in making a new copy of the famous Portland Vase<\/strong>, symbolising that the British Empire had at last surpassed the best capabilities of the craftsmen of the ancient Roman Empire.<\/p>\n 1790s: Thomas Wedgwood<\/strong> of Etruria invents photography (all bar the fixative).<\/p>\n 1792: Staffordshire’s Erasmus Darwin<\/strong> pens his best-selling poem The Botanic Garden<\/em> (1791, Part 1: “The Economy of Vegetation”) vividly celebrates the new industry and chemistry of the Midlands, comparing Staffordshire’s Etruria to peaks of ceramics making in past civilisations such as China and Etruria in Italy.<\/p>\n 1844: Katherine Thomson<\/strong> (1797\u20131862), seventh daughter of Thomas Byerley of Etruria, publishes The Chevalier : A Romance of the Rebellion of 1745<\/em>, partly set in North Staffordshire at the time of the Jacobite rebellion.<\/p>\n 1846: Stoke-upon-Trent Athenaeum<\/strong> collection founded.<\/p>\n 1847: A Potteries School of Design<\/strong> opens, with two centres (Hanley and Stoke).<\/p>\n 1850s: Minton<\/strong> encourages many fine artists to move to Stoke-on-Trent to work in ceramics.<\/p>\n 1853: The Burslem School of Art<\/strong> starts.<\/p>\n 1857 onwards: “Stoke School of Art<\/strong>, a government training school taken under the wing of the South Kensington Museum when it opened in 1857″. The School of Art<\/strong> was first regularly held in Stoke-upon-Trent’s old Town Hall (not to be confused with the current one), and then in 1859 it moved to the Minton Memorial building on the nearby London Road. Lasted until 1945?<\/p>\n 1869: Burslem School of Art moves to the new Wedgwood Institute<\/strong> in Burslem.<\/p>\n mid 1800s: There is a mention of a “Hanley Art School” in the online record. This is probably shorthand to refer to the street in Hanley now known as Pall Mall. In the mid-late 1800s Pall Mall was said to contain… “The Free Library, the North Staffs. Technical and Art Museum, the Government School of Art, the Potteries Mechanics\u2019 Institution, and the Theatre Royal”.<\/p>\n 1880s onwards: A critical mass of talented and trained artists<\/strong> are at work in the local pottery industry.<\/p>\n 1884: The seminal realist novel The Mummer’s Wife<\/em> (1884) establishes working-class Potteries life as a fertile literary setting, and this directly inspires Arnold Bennett<\/strong> to write his Five Towns books, and shorter masterpieces of the Potteries such as his “Simon Fuge” novelette.<\/p>\n 1888: H. G. Wells begins the earliest drafts of The Time Machine<\/em> (in final form in 1895) at Basford<\/a>. He is strongly inspired by the Potteries landscape, his first experience of an industrial district.<\/p>\n 1888: The first North Staffordshire Triennial Musical Festival<\/strong>, though only for one day. <\/p>\n 1890s: Miss Keary of Oakhill, Trent Vale, collects local folklore and children’s songs.<\/p>\n 1896: The North Staffordshire Festival launches Elgar’s fame as a great composer, with the first performance of his King Olaf<\/em>.<\/p>\n 1897: The world\u2019s biggest circus, Barnum & Bailey<\/strong> (\u2018Greatest Show on Earth\u2019), has its winter quarters on rail-yards near Twyfords, Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, from 1897 until 1911.<\/p>\n 1901: North Staffs District Choral Society<\/strong> founded, under Mr. Jason Whewall. Highly successful, it attracted royal patronage and continues into the 1930s.<\/p>\n 1904: North Staffordshire Symphony Orchestra<\/strong> started.<\/p>\n 1907: Purpose-built Burslem School of Art<\/strong> opens.<\/p>\n 1909: C.F. Keary\u2019s substantial novel The Mount<\/em>, featuring a lightly disguised Potteries and a girl art-student.<\/p>\n 1910: Four local museums federated<\/strong> in the County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent.<\/p>\n 1929: Muriel Pemberton trains at the Burslem School of Art. She then left for London, where in 1931 she helped Prof. Ernest Tristram to establish London’s first non-industry fashion training-course — in the form of a new Diploma in Fashion.<\/p>\n 1930s: The flowering of recognisably modern designs<\/strong>, in both shape and pattern, in the local ceramics industry. Women designers start to become more accepted. Serge Chermayeff preaches the style of European Modernism, in a series of lectures in Stoke-on-Trent circa 1935.<\/p>\n 1932: The Society of Industrial Artists<\/strong> founded in Stoke in October of that year. SIA… “is now beginning to develop local branches, of which the one at Stoke-on-Trent seems to work very effectively”. May not have lasted beyond 1939. Sounds like it might have been a communist front group?<\/p>\n 1933: The Society of Staffordshire Artists<\/strong> (SSA) was founded in 1933 (some sources say 1934), after much discussion between three principal local art groups: the North Staffordshire Art Society, the Staff and Student Society of the Stoke on Trent Art Schools and the New Group.<\/p>\n 1930s: Many refugees<\/strong>, fleeing Nazism in Europe, come to Stoke-on-Trent to offer their creative talents to the pottery industry. Such as Grete Marks<\/strong> and others.<\/p>\n