North Staffordshire History

The Rough Fleet, an amorphous gang of street thugs under the leadership of John ‘Mad Jack’ Wilson were a terror to the locals, notably in an...

On 1 April 1852, the writer Charles Dickens wrote a letter to his wife Kate informing her ‘We think of going on tonight from Birmingham to S...

According to the tale told, in the 19th century the Etruria Grove, a copse planted on the orders of Josiah Wedgwood near to his factory alon...

A portrait of R. R. Angerstein in 1755. Source: Wikimedia Commons A visitor to the mid-18th century Potteries was Reinhold R ü cker Angerste...

Between 1697 and 1702, partly from a wish to improve her health and from an equally strong desire to see more of her native land, Lady Celia...

Brownhills Hall, from an engraving made some years later. Source: John Ward, The Borough of Stoke-Upon Trent (1848) In 1796 whilst visiting...

Some of the unusual and dangerous practices indulged in by teenage girls to make themselves look attractive, were highlighted in 1901 in the...

'The Battle of Trafalgar' by William Clarkson Stanfield Source: Wikimedia Commons On 21 October 1805, a British fleet of 27 ships co...

In the early to mid 1920s, a pioneering film maker Claude Friese-Greene and his assistant, drove a car from Land's End to John O'Gr...

In early March 1783, the local economy was in decline and people were going hungry. A poor harvest the year before plus the knock-on economi...

In the early 2000s I was contacted by Ernie Luck a collector and researcher of Mason's pottery who had been looking into a vague connect...