We are back. It didn't feel like we were away for a week, more like we were gone for ten minutes. We packed a lot in, for there is a lot to see in north Staffordshire, more than you might think.
The Leek Embroidery Society. You won't be able to see them just for the moment, since the last day of their exhibition fell on our first day in Leek. The society was set up in 1879 or 1880 by Elizabeth Wardle with the support of her husband Sir Thomas Wardle, owner of a local dyeworks, who successfully developed a method of colouring previously dye resistant varieties of Indian silk, and collaborated on textile production with William Morris. The Leek Embroidery Society developed its own particular style using very subtle shading, which was greatly admired at the time, while Sir Thomas was a local philanthropist who still merits a plaque in the local Sainsbury. A little piece of industrial history I had absolutely no idea about until I went to Leek.
Biddulph Grange. A brilliant and bonkers Victorian garden carefully restored and recreated by the National Trust at the end of the last century. My first introduction to it was in a video of a TV programme about the restoration, shown in the course of a gardens restoration module, which featured two garden historians having hissy fits about the exactly correct shade of red to paint the rebuilt Chinese pavilion. Biddulph Grange has a series of fanciful buildings and themed gardens at its core, Chinese, Egyptian, country cottage, Italianate, but it is much more than that. The mapping out of interlocking and initially concealed spaces is extremely ingenious, and there are some rare and interesting plants. Its creator, James Bateman, had strongly held ideas about fossils and the Creation, which I'm afraid we didn't spend any time on, but the garden is delightful. I wanted to go because it was an important historic garden I hadn't seen, while half expecting to laugh at it, and instead was utterly charmed.
Brindley's Mill and the James Brindley Museum. James Brindley was one of the great canal builders of the industrial revolution. His knowledge of rivers and waterways led him into the water mill business, and at Leek he built a corn mill, now in the keeping of a charitable trust after restoration by volunteers. We managed to catch it on one of the relatively few days when it is running, and so I learned that an undershot waterwheel (wheel sits in the current of water) is only half as efficient as an overshot one (water hits the wheel from above). You don't often get the opportunity to see a 1752 water powered corn mill in action, but you had better go quickly, as the volunteers who run it aren't getting any younger, and there is a shortage of new recruits.
The Gladstone Museum. One of the few potteries in Stoke on Trent not to have been demolished. They no longer fire the bottle kilns, but all the parts of a pottery are there, from the engine house and clay mixing equipment through the throwing and moulding rooms to the decorating and mould shops. Luckily our visit coincided with a Heritage Weekend with demonstrations of the art of pottery, and so we were both mesmerised by the woman hand modelling flowers out of lumps of clay, while keeping up a conversation with local visitors who, like her, had once worked in the industry for real. And entry was free. A really interesting museum, and we left having learned the basic principle of how a bottle kiln was stacked. I had never grasped that the smoke was vented through the inside of the kiln, and while I'd heard of saggar maker's bottom knockers I didn't know what a saggar was (clay container in which pottery was placed for firing, placed in columns, they protected the pottery from the smoke).
Etruria Industrial Museum. This one confused me thoroughly before we went, because I'd heard of Josiah Wedgewood's Etruria pottery, whereas the Etruria Industrial Museum is nothing to do with him. It contains a steam powered mill once used to grind flint and bone to powder that was in turn used as raw material in pottery. I had never even heard of flint milling prior to our visit. We were lucky to catch the mill on the Heritage Weekend when it was working, and we could admire the 1903 boiler steaming, the beam engine dating from the 1820s turning majestically slowly, and the vast gears and paddles of the stone crushing equipment rotating. They don't actually crush stone nowadays, for reasons of health and safety, and the future of the museum (which is a scheduled Ancient Monument) depends on volunteers due to the squeeze on council spending. The museum sits at the highest point of the Trent and Mersey canal, which is interesting if you like canals. Unless you can go on a day when they are steaming there wouldn't be very much to see, and I'm not even sure the volunteers keep it open all the time.
The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Stoke on Trent's museum possesses a world class collection of ceramics, and is desperately in need of a Neil MacGregor to curate it. There are cases and cases of stuff, plates, jugs, pots, mugs, and what must be the world's largest assembly of pottery cow creamers. Little cards give you information on each individual item, once you've managed to match the description to the right object in the case. There is almost no overview to explain the sequence in which the major firms emerged, or the relative strengths of each, or anything technical, like what salt glazing is, or lead glazing. After our visit I still didn't know the difference between earthenware and stoneware, and had to look it up on Wikipedia when we got back to the cottage, and the only reason I knew anything about the history of Stoke's exports to the United States or the difference between porcelain and china was that I'd read it in a book by Emma Bridgewater and Matthew Rice before we went. The museum is free, and was being used by various mothers of small children as a dry place to exercise them on a wet day. One toddler was as bored by cases of ceramics as you'd expect, and was screaming the house down. A sadly wasted opportunity on the part of Stoke on Trent.
Stoke on Trent. Has possibly the most confusing and aggravating traffic system of anywhere in England. Make that Britain. Maybe Europe. Stoke has an unusual layout, because it is polycentric, developing from the six towns (not five). This has left it with more civic buildings than it can use, and tracts of secondary and tertiary space between them in places that you feel ought to be the centre. Great tracts of this has been demolished, along with the bottle kilns, and an impenetrable network of new roads installed, with a minimum of any kind of signposting. Despite all the new roads the traffic seems to flow incredibly slowly, and there are a monumental quantity of junctions and roundabouts. We weren't helped by the fact that the sat nav in the jaguar pre-dated the new one-way system, but signposts would have helped. Our portable navigation devices didn't, since Stoke appears to be in a 3 Mobile and O2 blackspot.
Northern Rail. Pips Stoke on Trent to the post for the least satisfying customer experience. The car park ticket machine at Wilmslow took five pounds of our valuable reserve of coins that we were hoarding for car parks, and didn't print a ticket, or return the money when the red button was pressed. Paying the outsourced operator of their choice by mobile phone was incredibly cumbersome, and would have been impossible had I not had a phone (not everyone has) or a pencil to write down the code of the station (5700) since it was raining so hard that my phone would have stopped working before I got to that stage, if I'd been standing in front of the ticket machine for the entire performance. The station staff said the ticket machine was nothing to do with them, and I noticed when we got back from Manchester that they still hadn't bothered to put a notice on it to warn other travellers. Northern Rail's management don't know it yet, but I am not going to let this one rest. I can waste considerably more than five pounds worth of their time in my quest to get my five back. (And they would still owe me twenty pence, morally speaking, for the confirmation texts). The train was twenty minutes late as well.
The Lowry. I have wanted to go to The Lowry ever since it opened. It is currently showing some previously unseen drawings by Lowry, as well as a selection of paintings. I presume a great part of the collection is at the Tate, but we were planning to go to that anyway. Lowry could draw figures and portrait heads, not to Lucien Freud standards, but he could certainly draw. And he studied at art school, and went to concerts and the theatre. The popular image of a self-taught artist whose prosaic job as a debt collector implied he had no intellectual or cultural hinterland is clearly wide of the mark. I liked the Lowry a lot.
The Imperial War Museum. Our visit to the northern branch of the Imperial War Museum started well, and went downhill. The Daniel Lieberskind designed building is fabulous, a series of great interlocking curved shapes clad in grey metal, rising above the canal which by that stage is vast. Inside it is divided into themed areas, with lots of glass cases with stuff in them, and some bigger bits of stuff, and we were just settling nicely into the first world war, and I was looking at a mine and reading about the minefields off Lowestoft, when the lights began to dim and an audio presentation started. All over the museum. Forget self-directed study and the recent vogue for lifting up little flaps and pulling out drawers, everybody in the museum was going to listen to a homily on the horrors of war whether they wanted to or not. A child's voice said that her father never came back, and another said that its school was blown up, and an adult voice intoned that humans had always made war and it was terrible. Anyone who watches the news on Syria each evening already knows that. We left. The noise was giving the Systems Administrator a headache, and I was just plain cross about being dragooned into listening to the communal lecture instead of being allowed to read about things in my own time.
The Museum of Science and Industry. This is brilliant. It occupies some fine historic railway buildings and an amazing ironwork former vegetable market. There is a huge room full of engines of various sorts, which made the SA very happy, and I watched fascinated through an ancient educational film about Manchester's former hydraulic power system. Another room looks at the textile industry. The vegetable market turned out to be full of aeroplanes, which pleased the SA very much. It is Manchester's most visited museum attraction, and is in danger of being closed to save money to keep the London Science Museum open. I thought we were meant to be inspiring young people about science, and Kensington is rather a long way for the children of the north to go.
Cromford Mills. This is the site of Richard Arkwright's first cotton spinning mill. There are fine Georgian buildings, restored or in the process of restoration, having undergone a chequered history since Arkwright's day. Other than that there is not a lot to see unless you catch them on a day when they are doing lectures or further interpretation. I think there might be some working models somewhere on the site, but we didn't manage to see them. We did see one of the practical difficulties of an overshot waterwheel, which is that since the channel that takes your water away obviously has to be lower than the one that brings it by the full height of the wheel, unless you have a naturally sloping site you have to raise the one or drop the other. Arkwright had to build a large and expensive culvert for the mill tail.
Masson Mill. There wasn't enough power in the mill stream at Arkwright's first site, but just up the road you can see his second factory. The building survived in commercial textile production until the early 1990s. Most of its storeys now house a shopping complex, which we didn't visit, but down in the basement is a collection of vintage machines covering every stage of cotton production from carding to weaving (excluding dyeing). There are live demonstrations twice a day, and so we saw cotton cloth being produced on a series of looms dating from the mid nineteenth century to 1973. It is a mark of how far textile production has progressed that the 1970s simple version of a Jacquard loom could make 130 passes of its shuttle per minute, while modern looms achieve several thousand, and have dispensed with shuttles according to our guide. Nowadays they use compressed air or a jet of water, but we couldn't imagine how. A very interesting museum and incredibly cheap at three pounds each, plus a modest parking fee.
Caudwell's Mill. This took us forward in time from the days of the undershot wheel and millstones to the water turbine and flour rollers. I was keen to see this, having worked my way several times through Elizabeth David's preamble to her bread book, in which she deals with the milling industry. Caudwell's Mill stands where a mill has stood for around four hundred years, in a very pretty valley on the river Wye (not that one), and was producing flour commercially until the 1970s. Most of the machinery dates from before 1914, and you can see the rollers, the sifters, and the elevators and archimedean screws that moved grain and flour around the building. One of the turbines was rumbling away, and some machinery was working, but they didn't have the whole process running end to end. It was still very interesting, and the bread roll in the cafe was the best I've eaten for a long time, a sort of wholemeal soda bread.
Haddon Hall. Is a fortified stone manor house, as featured in various films and TV dramas including Jane Eyre. Romantic and beautiful and with a rather fine long gallery, and rambling gardens wrapped around the buttresses. It is the lesser house of the Dukes of Rutland, their main pile being Belvoir Castle.
Chatworth. Was great, really well done. It is very popular, but you can see everything as you move through the house, and the grounds are so vast they can absorb vast quantities of visitors almost without trace. I hadn't grasped that the state rooms were so early. I assumed they'd have been redone according to Georgian or Victorian taste, but Chatsworth is still a Baroque palace. I love the Baroque. All those carved wooden swags of fruit and gold leafed window frames do it for me. The Emperor fountain is truly impressive, all gravity fed, and the sun shone so that we could see it in its full glory. Every stage of the famous cascade is deliberately made different to its neighbours, in terms of the drop, the number of steps, whether they have rounded or sharp edges, and whether there is any overhang, to vary the sound of the water as you walk past. The staff were friendly, informative when asked, and didn't convey that weary air that visitors are an imposition that you get in some stately homes. I liked Chatsworth a lot, including the fact that I have now seen the great grape vine from which the RHS autumn show award winning grapes have come in past years, beating rival entries from other ducal seats.
Buxton. Was smaller than we expected, and faintly disappointing. The park with its conservatory was nice, but the large attached cafe had a disconcerting whiff of loos throughout, and the shopping wasn't up to much. I thought I might be able to buy myself a necklace with a piece of Blue John in it somewhere on this holiday, but failed. Buxton's Devonshire Dome, grade II* listed and the largest unsupported dome in Europe, is part of the Leek and Buxton college. It is supposed to also contain a cafe and spa and be accessible to visitors as well as students, but signposts to them were non-existent, and we got embarrassed about hanging around a school, and gave up.
The Wedgewood Museum. Was everything that the Stoke museum was not. Each stage of Josiah Wedgewood's career, and the developments he pioneered in the pottery industry, was clearly explained, with a judicious mixture of interpretation panels and objects, then the later history of the firm from his death in 1795 to the present was charted, with rather more objects. Only the reasons for the firm's recent unhappy collapse were tactfully skipped over. The museum shares the site of the current manufacturing works, which also offers a Visitor Experience, and I began to see why the Inland Revenue considered them both to be part of the same entity, if the law allowed that interpretation. Josiah Wedgewood was an extraordinary man. When he started in the pottery industry, modest salt glazed and unglazed wares were the norm, perhaps decorated with slip. By the time of his death, his company had pioneered cream glazed ware, christened queen ware in honour of the queen, painted and transferred patterns, coloured glazes, and an incredible range of applied moulded decorations. He saw the potential of using lathes to finish pot forms, and learned about lathes. He saw the potential of steam power, and bought a steam engine. He needed better transport, and joined the movement to promote canals. And he appears to have been a thoroughly nice human being. We discovered we had spent nearly three hours in the Wedgewood Museum.
Trentham Gardens. Are fabulous. They are part of a private scheme, in which italianate Victorian gardens designed by Sir Charles Barry have been restored and redeveloped along with a shopping centre, hotel, and assorted leisure attractions. The brief for the gardens was given to Piet Oudolf for one part, and Tom Stuart-Smith for another. They have each done their own take on the new perennial planting movement, both are beautiful, and it is interesting to see them side by side, and see how easily Stuart-Smith's work sits with the Victorian built landscape instead of his usual corton steel. There was still plenty of colour, as well as lots of seed heads, and I was smitten with the beauties of a late flowering umbellifer which a gardener kindly identified for me as Selinum wallichianum. We didn't walk the mile to the end of the lake, but it looked a beautiful stroll if we'd wanted to, with rather more trees than in Capability Brown's day. Trentham is one of the largest and most significant examples of this style of planting in the UK, if not Europe. It was a nice sunny morning, and we shared the garden with approximately six other visitors.
Little Moreton Hall. A sweet, madly askew sixteenth century timbered house, now in the care of the National Trust. It is in that chunky, four-square style of timbering characteristic of Cheshire, quite different to the narrowly spaced thinner uprights of East Anglia. Nowadays it only stays up thanks to a concealed metal frame, but it is five hundred years old. There were an amazingly large number of other visitors for late on a Thursday afternoon in September.
The countryside. North Staffordshire and the adjoining bits of Derbyshire and Cheshire are quite astonishingly pretty. Rolling fields, very green and generously dotted with trees and small areas of woodland, give way to rolling moorland and wonderful jutting rock formations. There are some amazing hanging woods along the roads. Many of the trees are ash, alas, so if you want to see the countryside in all its beauty then go fairly soon. I fear the landscape will not be so generously wooded, given another decade or so.
Staffordshire oatcakes. Leek has a traditional oatcake shop, unchanged since it opened in 1964. It only opens in the morning, from early until lunchtime, and someone cooks the cakes on two large griddles in the front of the shop while unseen hands add the fillings behind the scenes. The cakes are about the diameter of a saucer, as thick as a pancake, and take quite a time to cook, so the griddles can't be very hot. I had one, with mushrooms, and it was delicious, faintly oaty and nutty, with little holes in it like a crumpet. We then tried catering versions at the cafe at Trentham, which were soggier and lay heavy on the stomach, so putting the SA off the whole idea. I have bought a book about them (on Amazon), and intend to give it a go.
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