Wednesday 6 August 2014

Through Stoke on Trent

Stoke - Old pottery 

 Stoke - Derelict canalside factory 


Stoke - Old bottle ovens preserved in grounds of block of flats

Heavy rain overnight but OK in the morning.  We  left the lake at 9:30 and traveled through Stoke.  As the guide book says " a fascinating length of canal, not always (if ever) beautiful but all extremely interesting". Extremely interesting particularly to industrial archaeologists as unlike in many places nowadays the old industrial canalside buildings have  been left to decay into dereliction rather than renovated to create flats, shops, restaurants, offices, and museums designed to take advantage of a waterside location.

At Etruria where Josiah Wedgwood built his pottery and arguably kicked off the industrial revolution, we reached the first of the locks which will take us down hill again all the way home.  There was a small queue of narrowboats when we arrived, longer by the time we left over half an hour later. By lunchtime we had left Stoke and were approaching the last of today's locks at Trentham.  We moored shortly afterwards opposite the "new" Wedgwood works built in the 1930s with the latest technology removing the need for the highly polluting bottle ovens.

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