Longton: a town where things haven't always been black and white...

HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS FOCUSES ON OUTSIDERS' VIEWS OF THE PLACE

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HAVE always been intrigued as to how outsiders see Stoke-on-Trent and I often ponder whether some of the six towns were viewed more favourably than others.

So this week, we're in Longton, considering some of the opinions that have been aired on the most southerly of the main centres of the Potteries.

Longton's reputation for pot-banks and pollution was earned over many years and it was the social commentator John Byng, Viscount of Torrington, who scribed in 1792 that: "At Lane End the population of the pottery commences & continues a street of many miles; - the men whiten'd with the powder, are supplied with coals to keep alive, the everlasting ovens, from every adjacent field."

Described in 1818 as modern and populous, the town had attained 'a respectable degree of opulence' and was beginning to establish a definite identity at this time.

We know it could boast of 13 pot banks in 1784, rising to at least 65 in 1867 and becoming a monochrome industrial town, the faces and work clothes of potters, whitened by clay, contrasting with the streets and buildings, blackened by airborne pollution from the firing of clay.

Smoke as William Blake's wonderful photographs show - billowed out of bottle ovens and smuts floated down from the sky so that if your ginger tom had slept for too long in the back yard, you'd probably have a black cat by the time he came back into the house. Discussions about smoke abatement continued throughout the century, though we suspect that councillors and pottery owners took part in the discussions only halfheartedly, as was underlined by John Aynsley's remark upon the opening of Longton Park in 1888: "Where there was most smoke there was most cash."