At the beginning of his 1908 masterpiece The Old Wives’ Tale, Arnold Bennett wrote of his native district, the Potteries in north Staffordshire, as “unique and indispensable because you cannot drink tea out of a teacup without the aid of the Five Towns; because you cannot eat a meal in decency without the aid of the Five Towns. . . All the everyday crockery used in the kingdom is made in the Five Towns – all, and much besides.”
Even when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Stoke-on-Trent and its neighbours Hanley, Burslem, Longton, Fenton and Tunstall (six towns in reality; but five for the purposes of Bennett’s fiction) were so bound up with the manufacture of ceramics that their collective name, “the Potteries”, was self-evident. The potbanks (as the factories are known) were woven into local life and culture. School friends’ parents worked in them, or in connected industries (kiln-making, brick-making, coal mining).
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