Gladstone Pottery Museum.

Cloudier and colder today. Nice when it was sunny but the sun never lasted very long.

At the zoo I spent most of the time weeding by the ferrets' enclosure watched by two little furry faces peering at me through the wire. It was very quiet today, no visitors at all just some pupils from the secondary school on their animal handling course. 

Back home I did some more gardening and baked a Bara Brith which got a little overdone as I became engrossed in a bit of sewing. Not long and I'll be off to Pilates.

Sunday- 

After a good night's sleep we went off to have breakfast at the Green Dragon, a large and very old pub that happens to be a Weatherspoon's. Not being a pub goer or a visitor to restaurants I was quite impressed with breakfast menu. I had eggs benedict on black pudding and Peter had a traditional breakfast fry up. 

Afterwards I sent Peter off to set up the satnav while I had a wander around Leek with my camera.

St Michael's Church, Leek.

We then headed off to Stoke to the Gladstone Pottery Museum. The above photo shows numerous bottle kilns in just a corner of the city. No wonder Stoke is also known as The Potteries.

Fellow fans of 'The Great Pottery Throwdown' will no doubt recognise the entrance through the tunnel where the workers would have punched their time cards.

It's an excellent museum and we learnt a lot about the processes involved in industrial pottery production in Victorian times. Interesting but terrible conditions for the workers.

The noise from just a couple of machines was horrendous and that was only for a few minutes until we moved to another area of the museum. Add to that the diseases cause by the toxic chemicals (lead etc) and the dust not to mention the sheer physical hard labour. It made for unpleasant reading to see that many children under 14 worked in the potteries and in 1861 there were 593 children just 5 years old working !! in the potteries of Stoke.

Moulds for making items that were not of a regular shape such as handles and spouts. Below is the chemist's room where new glazes were developed. There was so much to see in the museum including rooms of tiles, baths and toilets (the aromas in the air around the very earliest toilets were too much for my hyper sense of smell).  

We finished off with tea and cake (for me) and a Staffordshire oat cake with cheese (for Peter) before the three hour drive home. 

Here is a video (not mine) of the museum.