At the entrance to the Plume of Feathers there's a slate carving of a dog with a pint, which tells you most of what you need to know before you've even ordered. The pub sits on the corner of Station Road and the Trent & Mersey Canal, next to a railway crossing, looking out over a bowling green, and dogs are welcome in the bar and the front garden that catches walkers and cyclists off the towpath. Neil Morrissey used to run it — the walls still carry photos of him.
Food runs from a Boatman's Lunch of sausage roll, cider-braised ham, chipolatas, cheese and pickles, to a lamb shoulder rogan josh with naan and raita, and a smoked haddock scotch egg with Stornoway black pudding and curry mayonnaise. Doom Bar is the regular, with guest ales from Titanic Brewery and Marston's.
Up at the Duke of York, on Longton Road, it's a plainer proposition: front bar, a more comfortable lounge behind, brass plates and old photographs on the walls, crib and dominoes. Steak and ale pie, lasagne, chicken curry, a proper Sunday lunch — mains mostly £8 to £14. It was CAMRA's Potteries Pub of the Month in July 2017, the same honour the Plume of Feathers picked up the year before.
For provisions, the village store opens 6am to 9pm most days, and Mark's Quality Meats on Orchard Place handles the rest. There's a village market too, run by local stallholders as a fundraiser.
The best walking starts at Downs Banks, a National Trust stretch of heath and woodland two miles out, where a rock pillar at the highest point identifies the Wrekin, the Clee Hills and Mow Cop Castle on a clear day, and a small grazing herd keeps the heathland in check.
Closer to home, a canal walk follows the Trent & Mersey — which Josiah Wedgwood helped commission — past the Wedgwood works and around Barlaston Ley. Christopher Somerville, walking the same ground, described arriving to see "the Arts & Crafts houses of Barlaston, the village green and the curious, blockily-designed modern church."
That church replaced an older one on the Barlaston Hall estate, whose 13th-century tower is the only medieval part left standing. It closed in 1980 after mining subsidence cracked the walls, and has run since 2022 as a venue, St Johns at Barlaston Hall. The Hall itself was nearly lost — derelict, its staircase collapsed — until Wedgwood sold it to Save Britain's Heritage for £1 in 1981, on condition the restoration finished within five years.
Wedgwood moved its entire pottery operation here between 1938 and 1940, out of the smoke of Etruria and into a purpose-built garden factory with electric kilns. The V&A Wedgwood Collection now sits on the same site, over 165,000 objects.
The railway station closed to passengers in 2004; tickets to "Wedgwood and Barlaston" still get you onto the D&G Bus 100, the rail-replacement service two decades on. Stone is six minutes away.
On New Year's Eve the village green fills with people carrying twelve Saxon-themed banners, one for each month, processing by torchlight to Downs Banks, with a mummers' play at the Upper House en route and a burning longboat waiting at the Duke of York. Tim Cockin started it in 2004. It is now, by local standards, tradition.
