There is a town hall every couple of miles, and each would do justice to a small town like Aylesbury. None of them is outstanding in the usual sense, but each has its good points and is very like the last in character if not in style. Each embodies something of the sturdiness of the Potteries, and has its surrounding shopping area scattered about it in a homely muddle. Each is now, regrettably, acquiring a sterile and desperate collection of concrete cornflake boxes and toy-town sets of stairs and tunnels, cringing under the title ‘precinct’, a name more suited to the macabre activities of New World law enforcement agencies than the shopping needs of the quiet, friendly people of the Six Towns.

However, the existence of the Town Halls helps to explain why local folks refer to the area as “the Potteries”—very much in the plural—and not as “Stoke-on-Trent”. And why, when you ask the inevitable Midlands question “Where do you come from?” they answer “Burslem” or “Hanley” or “Stoke” or “Longton” or “Tunstall” or even, surprisingly, “Fenton”. "

'Portrait of the Potteries' Bill Morland