Absurdly grandiose – and splendid

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’.

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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. He gives us a little history, a little fantasy, a little whimsy, and a fair amount of wrath directed at town planners and wanton demolition, at the terrifying A500 and at recent ‘insensitive and insulting’ commercial designs. But the overall effect is exhilarating. He makes even the most down-at-heel terraces look full of architectural interest.

In an early section of Bennett’s Clayhanger, this year marking its centenary, the young Edwin is introduced to the concept of the unacknowledged beauties of Burslem by his friend’s father, the architect Mr Orgreave, who points out to him with admiration the Georgian façade of the Sytch Pottery. Matthew Rice, like Mr Orgreave, does a good job of revealing what we might otherwise overlook, pointing out the boot-scrapers of the artisan housing and the elegant iron balconies of Waterloo Road where the Clayhangers built their fine new home.