Gladstone Pottery Museum, Longton

The bottle kilns at Gladstone Pottery Museum are among the last of their kind. Once, hundreds of these brick ovens crowded the skyline of Longton and the wider Potteries, their smoke a constant companion to the six towns. Today only a precious few survive, and Gladstone, a working Victorian pottery preserved as a museum, keeps its kilns standing in a cobbled courtyard that has barely changed in a century.

This photograph catches that courtyard in its quiet dignity: the curved brickwork of the ovens, the worn cobbles underfoot, and the sense of all the hands that once worked here. Gladstone grew through the 19th century into one of the finest surviving examples of a Staffordshire potbank, telling the story of the industry that gave Stoke-on-Trent its name as the World Capital of Ceramics.

For anyone with roots in the Potteries, or a love of industrial heritage and honest British craftsmanship, this is a piece of Longton to keep on the wall. Printed on premium 230gsm archival matte paper, available in A5, A4 and A3, hand-printed and posted by me here in the Potteries, with free UK delivery.