If you have been following my blog posts, you will know that my friend Hanley Bear is very proud of his home city, Stoke-on-Trent, so you can imagine how excited he has been celebrating its 100th anniversary of becoming a city this year.
All year, he has pestered Polar and Grizzly to take him to special events and celebrations, sometimes with other members of the Hug and sometimes on his own, but his special mission has been to visit all of the surviving bottle kilns in The Potteries.
There are supposed to be forty-seven of them. Luckily, the Potteries Heritage Society produce a map showing where they all are. Hanley (and our humans) already knew where to find some of them, because they had passed them on the boat, or driven or walked past, but some are hidden away in back streets or parts of the city they hadn't been to before.
As there are so many and, according to Hanley, they are the most important buildings in the world, I am going to do more than one post about his adventures tracking them down.
Hanley started his mission on a very bright day at the end of February 2025, when we took our friends Milly the Mammoth and Blueberry Bear to the Middleport Pottery beside the Trent and Mersey Canal. Middleport Pottery is famous for using the traditional Victorian decorating technique of printing patterns onto tissue paper which then has to be carefully sponged onto the plates, cups, teapots etc.
There used to be eight bottle kilns here for firing pottery, but there is only one left - you can see Hanley with that one in the picture a little bit earlier.
Walking north along the towpath, they got a view of another bottle oven (see above). This one is the only one remaining from the Price and Kensington teapot works. The site has been bought by Mr Wayne Walker, who runs a wholesale meat shop nearby. He has already cleaned it up and made some repairs to the buildings and hopes it will one day have new shops and businesses (we hope so too!), but there is a lot to do.
The rectangular tower next to it is also a calcinating kiln - or rather two kilns inside a single outer shell. Another group of good people are also trying to restore this site and want to make the main building a music venue, which we think would be great. Hanley hopes they will have rock concerts and Northern Soul nights.
If you make your way up Newport Lane towards Burslem from the canal, there are two more bottle kilns at Furlong Mills, which were also calcinating kilns. Although the works doesn't use the kilns any more, they do still process minerals for the pottery industry, and other businesses.
Hanley went up the hill from Furlong Mills to see the "Three Sisters", which are not far from Burslem Town Centre. They have been cleaned up and repaired as they are in the middle of a site where new houses are being built, and are going to be a feature of the new estate. Hanley Bear was very pleased to see them looking so good.
He thinks it's very cool to have a bottle kiln along your street and says the people who live in the new houses are very, very lucky!
Hanley's last Burslem visit was to Moorland Pottery in Moorland Road. They make the famous "Stokie Ware" which is sold in gift shops all over the city, including the one at Trentham Gardens. You can see Hanley posed next to a "Stokie Legend" mug of theirs at the start of this post - because he is a Stokie Legend!
So Hanley's kiln collecting was off to a very good start, but he had lots more to find. Luckily, Polar had promised to take him to Longton for the Pig Walk Carnival a few weeks later, and I will tell you all about hat happened there in another post, hopefully quite soon.
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