Thread by @ian_lawley

Given the current furore over @SoTCityCouncil budget proposals it might be an apposite time to reflect on the history of museums in The Potteries & why they are so important.

Stoke-on-Trent City Museum & Art Gallery (now @PotteriesMuseum ) was the first new municipal museum to be built in England in the post-war period.
But there have been ceramic collections & museums in the district for more than two hundred years, both privately and publicly owned

The pottery manufacturer Enoch Wood formed one of the earliest local collections during the late 18th century.His aim was to show “the several gradations of the manufacture during at least 150 years from the coarse porrenger and the Butter pot, unto the fine Porcelain and Jasper”

Wood displayed his collection at his factory & it was seen by both local people and visitors to the area - an early example of 'pottery tourism'.

In 1835 the Pottery Mechanics Institution in Hanley announced its intention to form a museum which would be "an object of vast consequence to the manufacturers of the neighbourhood”. An exhibition of "Natural and Artificial Objects" was arranged for wakes week in 1838.

The exhibition included pottery, paintings, sculpture, scientific instruments, fossils, natural history specimens, antiquities and curiosities.
A second exhibition was held in 1839 & free admission given to 1000 Sunday School children and workhouse inmates.

The name North Staffordshire Museum and Pottery Mechanics Institution was adopted in 1843 & a site for the new museum was acquired in 1848. It eventually opened in 1861 & was dedicated to "the intellectual and moral advancement of the working classes of this neighbourhood”

Not to be outdone, Burslem’s civic leaders decided to establish a museum within the Wedgwood Institute. The foundation stone was laid by William Gladstone in October 1863.

At the ceremony Gladstone said "Beauty is not an accident of things, it pertains to their essence. Reject therefore the false philosophy of those who will ask what does it matter, provided a thing be useful, whether it be beautiful or not”.

The inaugural exhibition in April 1869 aimed to "illustrate the progress of the art from the Celtic and Anglo-Roman periods to its culmination under Josiah Wedgwood": Loans from the South Kensington Museum were also displayed & works by DeWint, Gainsborough,Wright, Etty & Millais

In 1887 the Chamber of Commerce, Manufacturers’ Association, Ironworkers Association & Mining Institute formed a committee to promote a central Technical Museum which would offer "technical training to the artisan & instruction to the manufacturers as to the wants of new markets"

The North Staffordshire Technical, Art and Industrial Museum opened in November, 1890. Focusing on "skill in workmanship, beauty in design & economy in production", it displayed exhibits on loan from the South Kensington museums as well as a permanent collection.

Admission was three pence, with free entrance on Monday and Saturday afternoons. Early activities included magic lantern lectures, study visits and evening meetings of the North Staffordshire Naturalists Field Club.

Museums in Tunstall & Longton were also opened in the 1890s to mark Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee.
By 1900, there were five separately administered museums in the area.

With the Federation of the six towns the museums passed into the ownership of the new County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent under the direction of chief curator, Alfred J. Caddie, who spoke of his intention to develop a ‘scheme of systematic development on educational lines’.

Following the Great War there were calls for a new, central museum to be built, befitting what was now the thirteenth largest town in Britain. But although the collections in each town continued to grow, plans were shelved.

Although regular art exhibitions were held, there was still no art gallery & the city did not start to collect paintings until around 1921. Five years later a local doctor, John Russell, left his art collection to the city with the proviso that they gave it a permanent home.

A plan to house the collection in Burslem Old Town Hall was rejected & it was eventually displayed in the Hanley School of Art, next door to the Hanley Museum.

The Sentinel was unimpressed, describing the room as 'unsuitable for an art gallery and quite unsatisfactory in its illumination'. It was not, said the paper, 'a worthy gallery of art'

It was in the aftermath of World War 2, in line with a nationwide demand for reconstruction, that the idea for a central museum was revived. Matters cam to a head in 1953 when it was revealed that Hanley Museum was 'falling down'. The national press took up the story.

In August 1953 plans were drawn up for the new city museum in Bethesda Street and £46,000 was allocated for its construction. It opened, on schedule, in 1956.