Day Trips from Manchester

In Brief. Middleport Pottery is a late 19th century pottery factory on the Trent and Mersey canal in Stoke-on-Trent. Now a visitor attraction, the charity-owned site still hosts a Burleigh Pottery factory, but also serves both as a heritage site with tours of the factory and a collection of art and craft studios.  I took the interesting 90-minute tour,  that featured both the history of the site, built as a state-of-the-art Victorian factory, and the current factory that uses a blend of traditional crafts with some modern equipment. The Kiln Yard, featuring a Bottle Oven. What's Here? Located next to the canal, for the efficient importing of coal and clay, and the smooth exporting of finished pottery, the Middleport Pottery was designed as a best-in-breed pottery in its day.  Now most of the original buildings remain, largely preserved and restored during the 2010s, and different parts of the site have been put to different purposes. This includes the return of pottery ...

  In Brief. The  Gladstone Pottery Museum  occupies a site that was used for pottery production from the late 18th century until the early 1960s. It was saved from demolition as a good example of a pottery factory with its distinctive coal-fired bottle ovens. The museum itself preserves and provides access to this distinctive infrastructure, while also stepping through the manufacturing process and describing the working lives of the factory workers in a wide variety of roles. There was also one demonstration of pottery making on the day of my visit. It is an interesting complement to tours of the current day Wedgwood factory that is four miles away. Bottle ovens and factory buildings. What's Here? A visit to the museum takes the form of a self-guided tour through the factory buildings.  The site is compact but densely packed, with four bottle ovens and a collection of buildings that include both pottery making paraphernalia and display boards that step through the ...

In Brief. The World of Wedgwood is a visitor centre located with the main Wedgwood pottery factory. Wedgwood has been making up-market pottery in (or now close to) Stoke-on-Trent since 1759. The factory is now in a suburban location, and has well developed visitor facilities. Factory tours can be booked in advance, there is a modern museum with a comprehensive collection of Wedgwood products covering the whole history of the company, and there is an impressive tea room, reassuringly devoid of disposable cups. Josiah Wedgwood What's Here. There are several different attractions on site that could seem like the focal point of a visit. Having booked the factory tour, my assumption was that it would be the high point, but it seems that for many the tea room is the main draw. The factory tour involves meandering through various spaces where different types of pottery are being worked on, from cups and teapots to pots and ornaments. This factory is in marked contrast to the scale and im...