The Potteries are one of the strangest regions in the British Isles, and Matthew Rice’s The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent celebrates their extraordinary oddity.
The Potteries are one of the strangest regions in the British Isles, and Matthew Rice’s The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent celebrates their extraordinary oddity. Much of his text reads more like a diatribe than a celebration, for words like tawdry, grimy, unlovely, brutish and lumpen scatter his pages, and he sometimes soars to the height of invoking the term ‘tragic’.
Yet for all that, this generously illustrated book makes you long to revisit this bizarre wonderland of post-industrial dereliction. His sketches and drawings of streets and buildings, of ceramics and pot banks and tiles, of cornices and columns and string courses and pediments, take you on a journey through the six towns (misleadingly but immortally lumped together as the Five Towns by their muse, Arnold Bennett) and reveal the survivals and failures of this sprawling, haphazard conurbation.
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