Staffordshire Potteries in the context of "West Midlands region"

Bocage (UK: /bəˈkɑːʒ/, US: /ˈboʊkɑːʒ/ BOH-kahzh) is a terrain of mixed woodland and pasture characteristic of parts of northern France, southern England, Ireland, the Netherlands, northern Spain and northern Germany, in regions where pastoral farming is the dominant land use.

Bocage may also refer to a small forest, a decorative element of leaves, or a type of rubble-work, comparable with the English use of "rustic" in relation to garden ornamentation. In the decorative arts, especially porcelain, it refers to a leafy screen spreading above and behind figures. Though found on continental figures, it is something of an English speciality, beginning in the mid-18th century, especially in Chelsea porcelain, and later spreading to more downmarket Staffordshire pottery figures.

Newcastle-under-Lyme is a market town and the administrative centre of the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, England. It is adjacent to the city of Stoke-on-Trent. At the 2021 census, the population was 75,082.

Newcastle grew up in the twelfth century around the castle which gave the town its name, and received its first charter in 1173. The town's early industries included millinery, silk weaving, and coal mining, but despite its proximity to the Potteries it did not develop a ceramics trade.

The Gladstone Pottery Museum is a working museum of a medium-sized coal-fired pottery, typical of those once common in the North Staffordshire area of England from the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century to the mid 20th century. It is a grade II* listed building.

The museum is located in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.It is also included in one of the regional routes of the European Route of Industrial Heritage.Despite the name of the museum, it is a complex of buildings from two works, the Gladstone and the Roslyn. The protected features include the kilns. As there are fewer than 50 surviving bottle ovens in Stoke-on-Trent (and only a scattering elsewhere in the UK), the museum's kilns along with others in the Longton conservation area represent a significant proportion of the national stock of the structures.

Tunstall is one of the six towns that, along with Burslem, Longton, Fenton, Hanley and Stoke-upon-Trent, amalgamated to form the City of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. It was one of the original six towns that federated to form the city. Tunstall is the most northern, and fourth largest town of the Potteries. It is situated in the very northwest of the city borough, with its north and west boundaries being the city limit. It stands on a ridge of land between Fowlea Brook to the west and Scotia Brook to the east, surrounded by old tile-making and brick-making sites, some of which date back to the Middle Ages.

The federation of Stoke-on-Trent was the 1910 amalgamation of the six Staffordshire Potteries towns of Burslem, Tunstall, Stoke-upon-Trent, Hanley, Fenton and Longton into the single county borough of Stoke-on-Trent. The federation was one of the largest mergers of local authorities, involving the greatest number of previously separate urban authorities, to take place in England between the nineteenth century and the 1960s. The 1910 federation was the culmination of a process of urban growth and municipal change that started in the early 19th century.

Little interaction between the separate settlements occurred until the 18th century when the pottery industry began to expand rapidly. By the early 19th century, initial steps had been made to ensure greater co-operation between the Potteries towns over the issue of law and order. The county plan of 1888 made the first attempts to form the six towns into one county borough, following an act of Parliament that restructured the county system and created the administrative county of Staffordshire. Wishing to remain independent, the Potteries towns discussed uniting to form a separate county, the Staffordshire Potteries. When it became apparent that such a move would fail, the proposal was revised to one of uniting the six towns into one county borough. This plan failed after Hanley Corporation and Stoke Corporation could not agree on the location of the future administrative centre. Instead, only Hanley gained county borough status because the other towns did not meet the criteria for such designation.

Chartism was a working-class movement for political reform in the United Kingdom that lasted from 1838 to 1857 and was strongest in 1839, 1842 and 1848. It took its name from the People's Charter of 1838 and was a national protest movement, with particular strongholds of support in Northern England, the East Midlands, the Staffordshire Potteries, the Black Country and the South Wales Valleys, where working people depended on single industries and were subject to wild swings in economic activity. Chartism was less strong in places such as Bristol, that had more diversified economies. The movement was fiercely opposed by government authorities, who finally suppressed it.

Support for the movement was at its highest when petitions signed by millions of working people were presented to the House of Commons. The strategy employed was to use the scale of support which these petitions and the accompanying mass meetings demonstrated to put pressure on politicians to concede universal manhood suffrage. Chartism thus relied on constitutional methods to secure its aims, though some became involved in insurrectionary activities, notably in South Wales and in Yorkshire.