Where have all Etruria's pubs gone

THERE ARE ONLY THREE LEFT IN ETRURIA NOW. HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS RECALLS SOME OF THOSE WE'VE LOVED AND LOST - AS WELL AS FOCUSING ON ONE THE AREA'S SUCCESS STORIES

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Mervyn recalls the Rose & Crown, also inset in its current incarnation as offices, as a 'classy' pub

WHEN I was in my early 30s, a 17-year-old chap I had befriended ventured the remark: “Merv, you do realise that by the time you're 70, a lot of the pubs that you know and love now will have been closed or demolished?”

Well, I’m still a few years away from being a septuagenarian but Neil - who is now 49 himself - could not have imagined the scale of the pub closures that he vaticinated all those years ago.

Today, only three pubs survive in Etruria. There is the Brindley Farm pub on the Shelton Boulevard, a gastropub that specialises in large cakes. I’m more of a malt loaf man myself, although I've sampled the cakes as a treat and also wandered around the pub scrutinising the bric-a-brac - a habit of mine that always unnerves pub landlords. A modern pub, it displays some interesting framed photographs of bygone scenes in the Potteries, once again reminding us of how the pub trade frequently summons the past to flog its present-day wares.

The past, however, sometimes sticks like barnacles to a ship's keel. Most Stokies I know still call the Toby Carvery overlooking the marina at Etruria by its original name, the China Garden, the moniker that it opened with on April 29, 1986. That's now 39 years ago - and perhaps the pub has now assumed the dignity of age. The highly successful Holy Inadequate in Etruria Old Road also clings tenaciously to the past through its railway paintings and its famous Roundhouse Stout that doffs its cap to the still-surviving little brick pepper-pot built by Josiah Wedgwood in the 1760s. At least the Holy Inadequate has some history to sell. It first saw the light of day as the Railway Inn beerhouse in the mid 1850s, being kept by a worker from the Wedgwood factory.