Gladstone Pottery Museum

The Gladstone Pottery Museum stands in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, within the Staffordshire pottery district. It occupies a group of buildings from two former potteries, the Gladstone and the Roslyn, both dating from the late 18th to the 19th century. The site includes several surviving bottle ovens, structures once common across North Staffordshire during the Industrial Revolution. Fewer than fifty bottle ovens remain in Stoke-on-Trent today, making the museum’s collection especially significant. The museum itself is a Grade II* listed building and part of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. The museum’s importance is recognised by its status as National Heritage Museum of the Year, awarded in 1976. The site began as a pottery in 1787 under the Shelley family, later becoming the Roslyn and Gladstone works. The Gladstone name came from William Ewart Gladstone, the politician, after the pottery was renamed in 1876. The factory closed in 1970 and reopened as a museum in 1974, preserving both the buildings and the traditional processes. Though production has been reduced, the museum still demonstrates the full cycle of making tableware by hand. Visitors walk through the restored workshops and kilns, including two biscuit ovens and two glost ovens in the Roslyn pottery. The engine house contains a Marshall & Sons steam engine, now electrically driven, and the slip room shows how clay and bone were prepared. Hands-on displays let visitors try throwing, moulding and decorating clay. Exhibits include the Gladstone Vase by Frederick Alfred Rhead and a gallery on sanitary ware history. The museum also displays ceramics recovered from the wreck of the Josephine Willis, which sank in the 1850s.