On Sunday morning, we went to see the gardens at Trentham, the ruined Barry house of the Dukes of Sutherland which was demolished in 1911 and of which now only the ruined sculpture gallery and Grand Entrance remain:-

The gardens were maintained for public benefit, with a dance hall, until the proximity of a local colliery led the Sutherlands to transfer its ownership first to the property developer John Broome, when much of the statuary is said to have been removed, and subsequently to the National Coal Board, when it was vandalised.   In 1996, the estate was acquired by St. Modwen’s Properties who have done a great deal to revive it without public funding, following plans drawn up by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and Tom Stuart-Smith and with planting by Piet Oudolf.   At the far end of the parterre is the copy of Cellini’s Perseus which we borrowed for the Bronze exhibition:-

And on the main road, we stopped to admire Charles Heathcote Tatham’s great, neoclassical mausoleum:-

We finished our day in Stoke-on-Trent by going to visit the Wedgwood Memorial Institute, a wonderful, over-decorated, mid-Victorian building with a mass of terracotta decoration, including the months of the year.   It was funded by public subscription and built on the site of Wedgwood’s second factory before he moved out to Etruria:-

Immediately north is the old town hall – a fine piece of flamboyant Victorian baroque, designed in 1854 by G.T. Robinson:-

Opposite was a neoclassical building which I haven’t been able to identify:-

And we went to see the Middleport Pottery, which was closed, but admired the ruined industrial buildings next door:-

I had been to the Bethesda Chapel;  but was still pleased to see it again – one of the great monuments of Methodism, opened in 1797 for a congregation of 600 after a dispute between the New Methodist Connexion and the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and enlarged in 1819 by J.H. Perkins, the headmaster of Hanley School, to accommodate 2,500:-

The best of the places we went to on our tour of Stoke-on- Trent was the Gladstone Pottery Museum, a beautifully preserved set of old industrial buildings in Longton, one of the Six Towns, some parts of it dating back to 1787 when a pottery first opened on the site.

What came across was the diversity of skills involved in the making of even quite ordonary earthenware, particularly once jiggering and jolleying had been brought in.

We started (wrongly) in one of the bottle oven kilns, filled with saggars:-

Then we went into the Engine House:-

Then, we saw the room in which the saggars were made:-

It reminded me of the terrible loss of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which likewise shows the processes of early industrial manufacture and the small-scale production and hand skills it involved, vivid and unromanticised.

I have been swotting up on the life of the 16th. Earl of Shrewsbury, who was responsible for the fantastic gothicism of Alton Towers, by reading the relevant chapter of Rosemary Hill’s biography of Pugin.   He only inherited Alton Abbey, as it then was, in 1827 on the death of his uncle, the 15th. Earl, and it was the 15th. Earl who had created a grand picturesque garden, with gothic temples, a pagoda and a reconstruction of Stonehenge, described by John Claudius Loudon in 1833 as ‘the work of a morbid imagination joined to the command of unlimited resources’.   Once, the 16th. Earl had succeeded to the title, he was at the heart of the Catholic revival, a friend of Ambrose Phillipps, patron of Pugin, and commissioned him to add to Alton Towers and to build a great Castle on the other side of the Churnet Valley:-

We arrived at dusk, driving down the Churnet Valley, with banks full of bluebells and wild garlic.   The station itself is castellated Italianate, opened in July 1849 and presumed to have been desogned by Henry Arthur Hunt, the architect for the North Staffordshire Railway, which ran alongside the river and brought day trippers out from the Potteries to visit Alton Towers:-

We had already arranged to go and see Patrick Kinmonth’s fashion exhibition in Chatsworth, but being in the neighbourhood, gave ourselves a sneak preview.   The state rooms on the second floor have all been blackened out in order to provide a theatrical installation of the ball gowns and state apparel of the Victorian Dukes, interspersed with the extravagant fashion outfits worn by Stella Tennant when she was a model:-

I preferred the gloomy Roman portrait busts:-

I was pleased to see the accounts of the second Duke’s grand tour in 1689 to 1691 as he travelled down through Germany, presumably to keep out of the way of events back home, while Chatsworth was being built:-

I liked the stiff collars of the eighth Duke:-

And it’s always a treat to see the Chapel, with its rich reredos, with a figure of Justice by Caius Gabriel Cibber:-

Last stop on our Staffordshire tour was St. Giles, Cheadle, Pugin’s ‘perfect revival of an English parish church of the time of Edward I’, commissioned by the Earl of Shrewsbury and full of incense, encaustic tiles and polychromatic decoration:-

We spent yesterday going round Stoke-on-Trent with a very knowledgeable local guide who knew and was able to tell us the whole history of the Six Towns – their origins in sixteenth-century coal mining, the beginnings of pottery making in the 1680s, the still rural character of the industry in the eighteenth century (there was a model of Etruria in the Stoke Museum with worker’s housing alongside the factory and the canal), the municipal grandeur of the civic administration in the nineteenth century and the amalgamation of the Six Towns in 1910.   This seems to have led to the progressive collapse of the industry, following the passing of the Clean Air Act, with absentee proprietors, slum clearance after the war and increasing conservatism in design.

But I can’t post any photographs until I have access to wifi.

For good measure, I’m posting a few photographs I took last night of the streets round Fournier Street as I wandered back to Aldgate East:-