5/13 Stoke-on-Trent, The Potteries City

Today, I am in Stoke-on-Trent, which is the home of many of the historically famous potteries, including Wedgwood.  I headed to the Wedgwood museum and plant and realized I should have come on a different day.  First, they were having a huge crafts fair, so the place was packed.  Second, the plant gives tours only on Monday-Friday, so there was not much to see, although I did get a peek on the non-working factory. 

They also had a museum which was organized by the date of pottery made by Wedgwood.  Here is just a few photos I took.  Can't show it all to you. 

I did like this children's set, however.  Plates were about 4" in diameter. 

There is also a Potteries museum in town that includes a display of the Stafordshire Hoard.  You may have seen this on television where the man with the metal detector finds three millions of pounds of Anglo-Saxon gold. He notified the authorities and he and the landowners each got 1.5 million GBPs out of the deal!

It was Sunday, so not much traffic, but I had a terrible time finding the museum and then getting into the narrow door of the parking structure.  Hard to get out also, and I confess that on the way in, I ended up accidentally driving across a paved park!   No photos, luckily, and no police around.

 

These items look large, but they are actually one to one-and-a-half inches wide.  Also, the stones are garnets, which the Anglo-Saxons apparently loved because they are not local to Britain.  Most of these came from the Czech Republic and India!  

Most are parts of swords, torn off and bent before they were buried. 

Thus, unusually, is a snake.  There were two in this display.

The fine filigree work on these items looks like the gold work you see in modern Italy.

The rest of the museum