As the area’s dominant industry expanded, manufacturers took advantage of technological advances to further their growth, and drive efficiencies. 

Burgess and Leigh – manufacturers of the famed Burleigh ware – followed the example provided by Wedgwood in Etruria, and located a new, ‘planned’ factory alongside the Grand Trunk Canal (Trent and Mersey Canal) in Middleport.

The Middleport Pottery

As with the Queen Victoria Jubilee Buildings, North Staffordshire’s prominent architect A. R. Wood was the mastermind behind Middleport Pottery, and produced a new model potworks that capitalised on the area’s communications networks, and was ahead of its time in terms of the pottery manufacturing process: potworks traditionally developed organically around kilns – Middleport Pottery was designed to enable a linear production process, and is now one of Stoke-on-Trent’s small number of Grade II* Listed Buildings.

Middleport Pottery and Burgess and Leigh were saved from the receivers in 1999 by the Dorling family, and the company – now known as Burgess Dorling and Leigh – continue to operate from the site. Indeed, Middleport Pottery is the only totally intact working Victorian pottery.

Artists Impression - from an 1893 trade directory 

 

Sid Kirkham's 'Fishing on the cut'

 

  more on the Middleport Pottery

Other communications improvements of the age included the growth of telecommunications, and by 1890, the Potteries had over 200 subscribers to the service. 

In April 1891, the National Telephone Company invited local people to their premises on Cheapside in Hanley to listen to a church service in Birmingham, which helped to further popularise what was still essentially a novelty. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Company had come to the conclusion that their service was entering the mainstream of society, and that over the coming years they would be likely to outgrow their home on Cheapside, and would require a much larger telephone exchange. 

They began a local search for a suitable site, and selected a plot on what is now Trinity Street, and developed the Telephone Buildings, a renaissance-style masterpiece in the ubiquitous local red brick and terracotta.

The Telephone Buildings, Trinity Street, Hanley

Further growth in the industry during the 1900s led to the development of larger more modern premises adjacent to the Telephone Buildings, which meant that British Telecom no longer needed the building. Fortunately, the building was granted Grade II Listed status in 1993 and is now home to the Fat Cat Café Bar.