KEY POINTS:
Nineteenth-century travellers would not have needed a map to find the Potteries, as the area around Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire is known. They could have just looked for the smoke billowing from the bottle ovens which were the most conspicuous feature of the landscape.
These ovens, as much as 30m high and gracefully tapering into the shape that gives them their name, once formed a brick forest that sprouted all over the Potteries. The smoke that belched from them until the introduction of clean-air legislation in the 1950s made the area one of Britain's most polluted.
Local wisdom has it that Stoke-on-Trent escaped destruction during World War II air raids because German bombers either couldn't see their target or, if they could, took it for one that had already been bombed.
A filthy business it may have been, but this was the centre of the exquisite ceramic production by firms with instantly recognisable names like Spode, Doulton and Wedgwood. The land was bad for farming, but provided the three key ingredients for the success of the pottery industry: a high-quality local clay, good supplies of water to work it and coal for the firing ovens.
Pottery was a cottage industry long before the men whose names are now fabled brands turned to large-scale production. It was the most famous of those names, Josiah Wedgwood, who started the first factory in the middle of the 18th century, and he built his fortune on the utilitarian and inexpensive "creamware", so named for its distinctive creamy glaze.
He was, by all accounts, an innovative entrepreneur with an eye for an emerging market: the middle class that the Industrial Revolution suddenly created who aspired to eat off something nicer than rough clay. The magnificent creations now associated with the Wedgwood name, including the iconic work of jasper blue with white ornamentations, would come later.
But if Wedgwood was the first, it was another Josiah - Spode - who made the breakthrough in the 1790s of cracking the exact recipe for the fine, translucent ceramics that the Chinese, the pioneers in the field, had been churning out for centuries. The key ingredient was the dried and crushed bones of cattle - hence the name bone china.
Most of the bottle ovens have gone from the Potteries now. But the modern-day visitor can get a good glimpse of the past in the Gladstone Pottery Museum, where several ovens still stand and some of the old technology is still working in displays.
It's an area of endeavour that spawned its own distinctive vocabulary of terms that technological progress has rendered redundant but no less charming for that: substances (pug), equipment (jolley and jigger) and roles (fettler) all had their own names.
Until well into the middle of the 20th century it was possible for a young man in the pottery towns to aspire to be a saggar-maker's bottom-knocker, in which capacity he would cut the circular bases to the round clay pans that protected delicate pieces from the marauding sparks and toxic gases in the firing ovens.
Progress has made the bottom-knockers redundant, but there are plenty of highly skilled artisans still working their magic.
At Gladstone, I watched a woman create an exquisite clay flower - stamens, pistils, petals and all - in barely a minute, using nothing fancier than a piece of mesh for impressing a pattern, a comb with alternate teeth removed and a six-inch nail flattened by a blacksmith. Elsewhere, these flowers, or plates or figurines, are hand painted using colours that are all oxides of metals - antimony, chromium, cobalt, copper - mixed with evaporated turpentine in generations-old recipes to make workable pastes.
The Potteries has experienced something of a renaissance in domestic tourism in recent years. It's part and parcel no doubt of Britons' increasing appetite for a past that is forever in danger of slipping away. In the few days I was in Staffordshire, I heard a radio programme about the dying art of flint-knapping (hand-shaping roof tiles), read an article about a crisis in the supply of skilled thatchers (30,000 houses in England alone have thatched roofs) and saw a television report of renewed interest in shin-kicking (a sport popular in the Cotswolds that is even sillier than it sounds).
Likewise, the interest in the old skills that made up the golden age of English ceramics draws the interest of tourists and school groups. And keen shoppers flock to the factory outlets for all the top brands at cut prices.
The Potteries will lure second- and third-time visitors to Britain, rather than the first-timers who are drawn to London and the big sights. But the area's increased profile is part of a renewal of tourism in the heart of Britain.
It's a welcome fillip for an area that has suffered more than many, as cheap Asian imports have priced their quality wares out of the mass market. Graeme Whitehead, the general manager of the Wedgwood Visitor Centre, is keenly aware that the company has had to change its game to deal with changing times.
"The pottery industry has really been struggling in this country," he explains. "And so we have had to adapt to changing fashions. Some of our brands [Wedgwood merged with the Irish glassmaker Waterford in 1987 and bought a struggling Royal Doulton in 2005] are very aspirational. People will say: 'I want it, even if I put it behind glass and just look at it and never use it'."
But the product lines have adapted to customer demand as well. You can still get the 60-piece dinner service with the soup tureen but Wedgwood has its names on pasta bowls, chopstick rests or dipping dishes for olive oil. They have hired celebrity designers like Jasper Conran and Vera Wang to come up with new ranges for style-conscious purchasers to whom design is as important as price. And meanwhile they continue to market their best ware to top-end buyers the world over.
"If you can't win with brands like that," says Whitehead, "you might as well all pack up and go home."
At the end of next month, Wedgwood will open a £10 million ($27 million) museum displaying the entire chronological collection including the pieces produced in Josiah's experimental trial and all the company's pattern books going back to the 18th century. The collection and the museum, explains Whitehead, are in the hands of a charitable trust so that the company will never be able to sell off its past to secure its future.
The Potteries is turning its history into a fascinating tourist attraction, offering glimpses of yesterday's craftsmanship to a generation reared on mass production. But it is not resting on the laurels of its past. A case in point is the £100 million redevelopment of Trentham Gardens, begun in 2003 and nearing completion. The gardens, one of the glories of early Victorian England, had fallen into neglect and disrepair and were, according to manager Michael Walker, "as sad a landscape as you could hope to find anywhere in the country".
But the new Trentham Estate, a 300ha redevelopment showcasing the work of leading designers Tom Stuart-Smith and Piet Odoulf, is turning an area once full of squatter settlements and illegal rubbish dumps into one of the glories of the modern Midlands.
Trentham's most offbeat attraction has to be the Monkey Forest, where 140 Barbary macaques roam in 25ha of woodland. The park, a development of projects in France and Germany established as far back as 1969, may seem too far north to make for a good monkey habitat. But general manager Sophie de Turckheim explains that the macaques are native to the Atlas mountains of northwest Africa where winter temperatures make England's seem positively tropical. The monkeys are among many surprises that make Staffordshire and the Potteries a worthwhile detour.
Peter Calder visited Staffordshire courtesy of Cathay Pacific and Visit Britain.
GETTING THERE
Cathay Pacific flies from Auckland to London 10 times a week (via Hong Kong), with return economy-class fares starting from $2799 (including fuel surcharge) plus $201 government/airport taxes/charges. For full schedules and fare information, visit www.cathaypacific.co.nz.
National Express provides frequent coach services running throughout the day from Heathrow and London's Victoria Coach Station to Stoke-on-Trent with journey time of between 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 hours. Visit www.nationalexpress.com.
Virgin Trains provide a half-hourly train service from London's Euston to Stoke-on-Trent with a journey time between 1 1/2 and two hours. London's Euston is easily accessible from Heathrow via the London Underground. Visit www.nationalrail.co.uk.
WHAT TO DO
The Potteries is a generic name given to Stoke-on-Trent, the centre of English ceramics, about three hours by road from Heathrow. Six towns make up Stoke-on-Trent: Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton.
A biennial three-day ceramics festival in October (the next in 2009) is a must for the real enthusiast but the area showcases its namesake products all year round. The ceramic industry dominates but the new Trentham Estate (www.trenthamleisure.co.uk) provides an attraction for garden lovers, and the Monkey Forest (www.monkey-forest.com) is a genuinely unusual attraction.
FURTHER INFORMATION
See www.visitstoke.co.uk.
