St. Martin's Lane, Longton

"Even in the 190's, some pottery workers still lived in small insanitary houses under the shadow of the factories and bottle ovens. This typical scene, long vanished, was in St. Martin's Lane, Longton. One visiting writer described it as "Victorian industrialism in its dirtiest and most cynical aspect"

".... the Staffordshire Potteries were, in the main, made up of hundreds of relatively small potteries (hardly factories in the accepted sense of the word) situated in narrow streets.

These countless small potteries changed ownership at frequent intervals as the trade was highly competitive and profit margins were cut to unrealistic levels. This fact is underlined in page after page of this work, where the several changes of ownership or partnership are recorded.

These smaller potteries were mainly concerned with producing ordinary domestic earthenware, decorated with printed designs -inexpensive ware..."

Jewitt's Ceramic Art of Great Britain

"The aspect of the streets and thoroughfares of Stoke is anything but attractive to a stranger, presenting more the appearance of a fourth-rate London suburb than a town of business.

Rows of small brick-built houses, rarely more than two stories in height, are broken into by huge brick-built factories covering whole acres in extent: monstrous cones of solid brick lift their peaked heads above the roofs of the houses, and here and there their burly basements bulge forth into the street and shoulder the passenger out of the direct path. Tall chimneys of brick soar up into the sky and spread their clouds of smoke through the sooty air; and beneath your feet a pavement of brick borders either side of the muddy road ...

Longton. or Lane End... is perhaps the most characteristic town in the whole of the Pottery district. It is, as the name implies, a very long town, and is undoubtedly the most crowded, and if we are to judge from outward demonstrations, the least polished locality in the whole borough.

It is place, however, where a vast deal of business is done and abounds in manufactories, some of considerable extent, which do a large trade. A great many of the others are in the hands of men of limited capital, not a few of whom produce an inferior kind of ware suited to a cheap market.

It is by the exertions of the Longton potters that the working-man and the cottages are enabled to set a china tea-service on their tables, brilliant in colours and gold, at a cost we must not name but which the humblest house-keeper can contrive to pay. An immense quantity of the low-price English china, as well for exportation as for home consumption, is here manufactured weekly,..."

from a 1850's weekly magazine "The Leisure Hour - a Journal of instruction and recreation" June 1853

St. Martin's Lane, Longton on a 1898 map
the proliferation of bottle ovens situated right in the middle of Longton town centre can be seen on this map

St. Martin's Lane, Longton - Google maps, 2011
St. Martin's Lane survives as an access to the car parks behind
the shopping precinct which has replaced the pottery factories

contents: 2011 photos