Stoke-on-Trent

Six Towns, One Appetite

Order a Staffordshire oatcake in Stoke-on-Trent and you get a dense, savoury pancake of oatmeal, flour and yeast, rolled or stacked and filled with cheese, bacon or sausage. It has been the local breakfast since the 18th century and the staple diet of pottery workers since the 19th, and there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty oatcake shops across the city and north Staffordshire. High Lane Oatcakes in Burslem has been praised by Robbie Williams and by Phil "The Power" Taylor, the darts world champion, both of whom are from around here. Bucknall Oatcakes has been using the same recipe and hand-baking it the same way since 1942. For years the most famous of all was the Hole in the Wall on Waterloo Street in Hanley, which sold oatcakes through the front window of an end-terrace house, opened up from the living room. It ran that way from the 1920s until 2012, when it was closed and demolished under an urban-renewal scheme. People still mention it.

The first thing to understand about the city is that it isn't one. Stoke-on-Trent is six towns strung along the Trent valley, federated in 1910 and granted city status in 1925: Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke-upon-Trent, Fenton and Longton, running north to south. The railway station and the civic centre are in Stoke-upon-Trent, but the shops, theatres and restaurants are in Hanley, which is the bit marketed as "the city centre." The whole conurbation is The Potteries, and the pottery is the reason to come.

If you are basing yourself anywhere for eating out, make it Hanley. The Orange Tree Bar and Grill does steaks and cocktails in a Georgian building with a modern glass extension bolted on, and is known for its "dirty burger" of blue cheese sauce, jalapeños and maple bacon. NØRTH Kitchen + Bar is the Nordic-inspired option, stripped-back wood and industrial decor, doing burgers, tacos, bowls and a run of health-minded plates. The Slamwich Club is a sandwich specialist that also does a full English and an oatcake topped with mushrooms, cheese and tomatoes. Bar Fiesta covers Mexican tapas — chicken pintxo skewers, padrón peppers, champiñones al ajillo, carne picada. La Bella Napoli is the family-owned Italian on Piccadilly, doing authentic pizzas.

For a drink, the town you want is Burslem, the oldest of the six and the one locals call the Mother Town. It is a genuine real-ale destination, with a cluster of pubs known as the Golden Triangle sitting within a short walk of each other, all near Titanic Brewery, which is based in the town. The Bulls Head on St John's Square is Titanic's flagship and brewery tap, a pub dating to the 1830s and run by the brewery for more than thirty years. It pours nine real ales, including the Titanic classics Iceberg and White Star, alongside up to ten real ciders. It has won CAMRA Potteries Cider Pub of the Year repeatedly between 2012 and 2023, has been in the Good Beer Guide since 2007, and was CAMRA Potteries Pub of the Year in 2022. If you can't get to Burslem, the same brewery runs the White Star in Stoke and the Greyhound in Hartshill, both with the same reliable cellar.

Memorials in Clay and Brick

The brewery's whole identity is a memorial. Captain Edward Smith, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, was born in Hanley, and there is a statue of him in the Cultural Quarter. Iceberg, White Star and Captain Smith's are all named for him.

Now to the pottery, because it is everywhere and it is the point. The skyline was once dominated by up to four thousand bottle kilns, their bottle-shaped brick chimneys firing coal all night. Around two thousand were still standing in the 1950s. The Clean Air Act of 1956 killed the coal-fired ovens, and today just forty-seven survive. Longton has the densest surviving cluster.

Longton is also where you'll find Gladstone Pottery Museum, which is Britain's only complete Victorian pottery factory — original bottle kilns, cobbled yards, workshops, all intact. It is the filming home of the BBC's Great Pottery Throw Down, and it opens January to October, Wednesday to Saturday, and on Sundays from eleven.

In Burslem there is Middleport Pottery, the UK's last working Victorian pottery factory and the home of Burleigh ware, sitting on the Trent & Mersey Canal. Its bottle oven has eleven firemouths, the largest surviving in the city. It was rescued by the Prince's Regeneration Trust, and in 2025 it won Gold for Small Visitor Attraction of the Year at the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Tourism Awards.

The Potteries in Full

Out at Barlaston on the southern edge of the city is World of Wedgwood, which marks more than 250 years of pottery and houses the V&A Wedgwood Collection. There is a Clay Studio where you can throw your own pot, a Decorating Studio, a factory tour and a tea room, open daily from ten to five. It was founded by Josiah Wedgwood, who industrialised pottery manufacture, was a prominent abolitionist, and was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. The collection nearly didn't survive: in 2014 it was almost broken up and sold to cover a pension deficit, until a public appeal raised £15.75 million to keep it for the nation.

The Emma Bridgewater Factory at Eastwood, near Hanley, makes the hand-decorated spongeware and has a decorate-your-own studio and a factory tour. Its Factory Café is worth the trip on its own, serving simple home-cooked food from Emma Bridgewater's own recipes — breakfast muffins, oatcakes with various fillings, toasted teacakes, homemade cakes, afternoon tea with scones and clotted cream — all served in the half-pint EB mugs. It opens Monday to Saturday from nine, and Sundays from ten.

Two more for completeness. Spode Works in Stoke was the home of Josiah Spode, who invented bone china, and is now a visitor centre and creative village in the old works. Etruria Industrial Museum, at the junction of the Trent & Mersey and Caldon canals, is Britain's last steam-powered potters' mill — Jesse Shirley's Bone & Flint Mill, which supplied the industry from the 1800s until 2011. It is Grade II*-listed, and it was opened to the public by the steeplejack Fred Dibnah in 1991.

The one to see if you only see one is free. The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley holds the world's greatest collection of Staffordshire ceramics, and two other things besides. It has the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found, buried in Mercia around 650–675 AD, dug out of a Lichfield-area field by a metal detectorist in 2009 and worth over £3 million. And it has the Spitfire Gallery, built around Spitfire RW388, given to the city in 1972 in honour of Reginald Mitchell, who designed the Spitfire and was raised in Butt Lane just north of the city. He died in 1937, before any of the 21,554 aircraft that followed his design were built.

Gardens, Towpaths and Terraces

For a day out with children, Trentham Estate to the south is the obvious one — 725 acres, with award-winning Italian Gardens beside a mile-long lake laid out by Capability Brown, a wire fairy sculpture trail, a barefoot walk that was the first in the UK, a family maze, and the Trentham Shopping Village with its fifty-odd shops, fourteen cafés and free parking. Next door is Trentham Monkey Forest, sixty acres of the UK's largest primate habitat, where 140 free-roaming Barbary macaques wander along a three-quarter-mile path. There are feeding talks on the hour, and if you show a Monkey Forest receipt you get a pound off the gardens.

Closer in, Hanley Park is a 63-acre Grade II Victorian park that opened in June 1897, near the centre and the station, with a restored Pavilion Café, a boathouse, a bandstand and a fishing lake. Central Forest Park sits on 49 hectares of reclaimed colliery land and has Europe's largest street-style skate park. Westport Lake is a nature reserve on the Trent & Mersey Canal, with two lakes, a visitor centre, a café and birdwatching.

That canal is the best walking in the city. The Trent & Mersey and the Caldon thread right through it, the towpaths were upgraded in the 1990s, and they now form part of National Cycle Network Route 5. A flat walkable route runs through Cliffe Vale to the Etruria junction and on to Hanley Park. Head north on the Trent & Mersey and you reach Harecastle Tunnel at Kidsgrove, the 2,676-yard Telford and Brindley tunnel, which makes for an atmospheric stretch of canal.

The football splits along old lines. Stoke City play at the bet365 Stadium, built in 1997 and known until 2016 as the Britannia. Sir Stanley Matthews, the Stoke-born winger they called the Wizard of the Dribble, opened the ground in 1997; his ashes are buried beneath the centre circle and his statue stands outside on Stanley Matthews Way. Port Vale, the city's second club, play at Vale Park in Burslem, which is a proper old-fashioned lower-league ground.

Ways In, Ways Out, Five Towns in Fiction

Getting here is easy. Stoke-on-Trent station sits on the West Coast Main Line, served by Avanti West Coast, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, Northern and West Midlands Railway, with direct trains to London Euston, Manchester and Birmingham. By road the A500, the dual-carriageway spine locals call the D-road, loops through the city between junctions 15 and 16 of the M6, and the A50 plugs into it heading east toward Derby and Nottingham. Hanley bus station is the local hub, and the Potteries Museum is about a twenty-minute walk or a twelve-minute bus from the station.

If you want to get out for a day, Alton Towers is twenty-five minutes east into the Moorlands, and Leek is a handsome market town twenty minutes north-east, full of antiques and independent shops, and the gateway to the Peak District and the gritstone ridge of The Roaches. Biddulph Grange Garden, with its extraordinary Victorian themed gardens, is fifteen minutes north.

The last word belongs to Arnold Bennett, who was born in Hanley, raised in Burslem, and turned all six towns into fiction. He renamed Burslem as Bursley, Hanley as Hanbridge, Stoke as Knype, and he left one town out altogether. Fenton didn't make the cut, because Bennett decided "Five Towns" sounded better than "Six." More than a century later, Fenton is still known locally as the forgotten town, which is roughly the fate of anyone edited out for the sake of a nicer-sounding phrase.