Jack told me his uncle was a furnace worker who was killed when he drunkenly stepped off the Vine’s pavement in front of a car.

Naturally Cheryl doesn’t remember such colourful times but she says, “My dad told me how all the pubs lined up pints at the end of the shift at Shelton Bar. The end of industry caused the end of all those pubs. The New Rendezvous is the last of them.”

The New Rendezvous remains a quaint hostelry. In an attempt to recapture the industrial atmosphere imitation steel girders are suspended above the bar. Sadly the present location fails to match the mood. Nevertheless the former Railway Hotel is an impressive edifice, looking every bit as a typical Victorian railway hotel should.

“Everything’s changed around here now,” says Cheryl. “New houses have replaced old industry. I remember there being four giant gas holders standing in the gasworks. Now there’s one which I think is just an emblem of the past. My clearest childhood memories are the times I played in Etruria Park. Even that has changed, although I think much for the better,”

The 11 acre park was built on a triangle of land between Lord Street, Etruria Vale Road and the Trent and Mersey Canal. Historian Steve Birks has researched its origins.

“Industry virtually wiped the lovely Etruria Grove off the map,” he says. “In Wedgwood’s time it was idyllic, but it’s prominence as a gateway and proximity to key communications networks, brought factories to the area in abundance. To compensate for this Hanley Corporation decided to open a park. The ceremony took place in September 1904 at a purchase cost of nearly £5,000. A carriage drive led from the three main gates crisscrossing the central point from which were laid a bowling green and tennis courts. But the main position of interest was just inside the gates off Lord Street where an ornamental drinking fountain was erected by the town mayor Henry Shirley and his elder brother Jesse Shirley, the famous flint millers and bone grinders.”

ornamental drinking fountain

Sadly the fountain has seen better times and has been seriously damaged by years of industrial pollution and neglect. The other artefact of note is the plaque that was erected to commemorate the services of Thomas Wedgwood to photography.

“Thomas Wedgwood was the fourth son of the potter Josiah Wedgwood and was born at Etruria Hall in 1771. He was an early experimenter in photography,” says Steve. “As a young man he was treated for consumption at a Bristol clinic where he met Humphry Davy who published Wedgwood’s experiments with silver nitrate that captured images onto permanent mediums. This event essentially was the birth of photography as we know it today.”

Near to the entrance of Etruria Park from the main road the Society of Staffordshire Photographers unveiled a bronze plaque to mark this event in 1953.

“Of all the parks in Stoke on Trent,” recalls Steve, “Etruria once had the greatest mix of education and recreation facilities. It had one of the highest children’s slides in the Potteries. But, along with the witches’ hat, it was removed in the 1970’s as it was considered to be too dangerous for kids.”