Red sky at night... Shelton's all right!

IT MAY HAVE BEEN A MAJOR POLLUTER BUT SUCH WAS THE IMPORTANCE OF SHELTON IRON AND STEELWORKS TO STOKE-ON-TRENT'S ECONOMY MANY FAMILIES WERE WILLING TO PUT UP WITH ITS ILL-EFFECTS. HERE HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS ALSO FINDS A HINT OF ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY AMONG ITS ROLE AS AN INDUSTRIAL POWERHOUSE

- 

HEY used to reckon that Etruria Park was the most polluted park in North Staffordshire.

When you consider the welter of industry in close proximity to it, it is easy to understand why this verdant space became blackened with airborne smuts. The smoke-billowing bottle ovens of Wedgwood’s Etruria Works were nearby but this was mining territory, too, with such as the Racecourse Colliery and Grange Colliery pits a short distance away.

However, it was pollution from the chimneys and blast furnaces of the Shelton Iron and Steel Works that really triggered the sullying of the little park and created a pervasive achromatic gloom.

Not that the site didn’t have a spell about it, according to many commentators such as J. R. Hollick, who wrote the foreword to Alan C. Baker’s book on The Potteries Loop Line. “Etruria was hardly beautiful,” understated Mr Hollick, “but was full of interest and activity, the gateway to a romantic world of mystery behind the steelworks.”

Another famous admirer of the works at Shelton Bar was none other than H G Wells, who briefly stayed at Basford in the 1880s and who was so bedazzled by the industrial lightshows that waxed and waned over the valley that he felt constrained to write, in his short story, The Cone: “A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery. Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses... Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains shunted - a steady puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the ... blast furnaces, the central edifice of the big ironworks...”