Weaving original words,music, drama and dance to celebrate the beauty grit and resilience of the Potteries’ most famous product and its people, past and present, exemplified by Gladstone Pottery Museum. This is a chance to support a community-led project already working with BCB and CORE Longton heritage project plus Creative People and Places Stoke (Arts Council money administered by the New Vic)
Background
Stoke on Trent has an active and diverse Creative Community but until recently this has been fragmented, partly due to it being a deprived area of the West Midlands. Indeed Stoke has been identified as an area of low engagement with arts and culture (Active People Survey)
We are already in touch with a number of such groups and individuals. The groups will be involved in the planning of the workshops and the way in which the resulting material is interpreted. As a result, many more people will have the opportunity to learn about the rich heritage of the Potteries and to share it in creative new ways. Gladstone Pottery Museum (GPM) was one of the first British industrial buildings to be saved and opened to visitors. The project will create a valuable and lasting archive of recordings (Film and sound) of people involved in the preservation of the Gladstone site 40 years ago and the development of the museum since. GPM has paper records of development phases, but this project gives the opportunity to record the stories of those with the passion to preserve Stoke-on-Trent's Heritage, and those who work to help visitors understand how people made pottery in the days of coal fired bottle kilns. Although some of the original skills are still demonstrated at Gladstone, many former skills such as saggar making, kiln firing and many more, have been lost as the people formerly employed to do them have retired or died. While there is plenty of archive film showing these trades, the museum does not have the same degree of oral records for many of these [which it has for some other] skills. The project will include filmed interviews with as many former industry employees as can be found, including the people involved in the last firing of the GPM bottle kiln, ”Big Bertha” in 1978, and so fill a gap in the museum's existing records. ”Sound bites” will be selected from these interviews, to be [and] included in the celebration performance and inform the musical interpretation. Despite its uniqueness, GPM is not as well known as it should be, even in Staffordshire, partly due to its location in Longton on the South-Easternmost edge of the Potteries - Arnold Bennett referred to it as hell because Longton is in a hollow and in his day was surrounded by smoking pot banks. This project will draw attention to Gladstone and its collections over a year long period with several workshops during the first stage and then the publicity surrounding the performance event in the second stage. We will put calls out in many different places to ensure a wide variety of groups are targeted. Preliminary investigation has shown that many ”locals” have not visited the museum before and consequently are unaware of its rich heritage store. A multi arts celebration will attract some of these — especially Schoolchildren and their families. All the above can be measured in terms of numbers attending workshops and the performance and also the body of material produced. Please email: [email protected] for more info.
