Big celebration for city built on craft and graft

One hundred years ago, on June 5 1925, a palpably excited crowd at the historic King’s Hall witnessed the reigning monarch ‘gladly consent to the request that the title and status of city shall be conferred upon your county borough’.

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Next Thursday marks the official centenary of that momentous occasion when King George V, on a visit to ‘this place that has such a great artistic and industrial mix of talent and fortitude,’ unexpectedly bestowed city status on Stoke-on-Trent through royal letters patent.

It will also set the inaugural Stoke-on-Trent Day in the calendar to commemorate the city being granted its elevated appellation because of its outstanding importance as the centre of the country’s pottery industry.

Stoke-on-Trent Day is expected to become an annual celebration of the history, culture, the built and natural environment and communities that make this incredibly proud city of craft, graft and collective endeavour.

This year’s centenary Civic Prayer Breakfast will kick-start a series of events to acclaim the city’s distinguished past, reflect on the present and look to the future with optimism and positivity.

A seasoned cultural highlight hosted in the splendid hall where city status was bestowed 100 years ago, the early morning gathering for people of faith and secularists is the largest of its kind outside the Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast in Westminster.