大象传媒

Maybe they look out of their train window and see the Britannia stadium just before they arrive at Stoke Station.

Or maybe they head straight to the Festival Park or the cultural quarter for a night at the theatre or at a restaurant?

But from the 1870s up to under fifty years ago a visitor to the Potteries wouldn鈥檛 have been able to ignore all the bottle ovens that dominated the skyline.

Heyday

Experts calculate that in the heyday there were up to 4,000 bottle kilns with as many as 2,000 still standing in the 1950's.

While many visitors still come to the area to learn about the history of the home of the ceramics industry who now talks about the bottle ovens? They will go unheralded no longer.

Bottle ovens were the types of ovens that transformed the clay into something resembling the finished product. Some factories had just the one bottle oven while larger pot-banks would have up to twenty five and they were everywhere you looked.

Hovel

There was no typical type of oven and their style was subject to the whim of their creator. However they were all vaguely bottle shaped and the outside of the ovens was referred to as a 鈥渉ovel鈥�!

The hovel would whisk away the smoke by creating a draught. As you can imagine this produced a fair bit of smoke across the city.

The undoubted capital of the bottle oven was Longton which boasted more than anywhere else. When the bottle ovens were fired up down Longton way you couldn鈥檛 see to the other side of the street let alone your hand in front of your face.

1250 degrees celcius

The ovens would reach temperatures of 1250 degrees celsius and one of the less favourable jobs was being forced to enter the kilns to retrieve some of the ware before it had fully cooled in there. There obviously wasn鈥檛 as much of a claim/blame culture back then!

It would require fifteen tonnes of coal to fire one bottle oven just the once. So you know who to blame for the dwindling reserves.

Bottle ovens, once cooking, would be used for up to five days as they went through the various periods of smoking, biscuit (first) firing and glost (second) firing.

The end for the Bottle oven came in the 1960s. You see people had cottoned on that all that smoke (that would filter up through the chimney and then hover around the tops of surrounding houses) was probably not that good for the health of the people who lived in the area - let alone the workers.

The Clean Air Act

The Clean Air Act meant that the reign of the bottle oven was over. However 47 still stand tall and proud, protected as listed buildings.

Lottery funding and money generated by site owners and the Staffordshire Environmental fund raised over 拢350,000 to protect these remaining bottle ovens so that their legacy can live on.

One of the main Pottery museums can be found at the Gladstone Pottery Museum. This is the only place in the world where you can step inside a bottle oven and smell the oven firing!