Sorry, I missed a day yesterday. It started badly when we arrived at our planned breakfast stop to find it shut, though the website said it was open. Then we got caught in a cloudburst, couldn’t find a suitable replacement and eventually ended up in Stoke on Trent late, wet and(in my case) extremely grumpy.
Apart from that it was a good day, as these things go. All the small potteries and backstreet shops have gone now and they have been replaced by well lit shops staffed by loud and smiling women. They are not my sort of place, and judging by the price tags, they are not the sort of place where you will find a bargain either. I do not know how people can seriously contemplate buying a circle of glazed clay for some of the prices on display when all you are going to do is cover it with gravy, saw away with a knife and then drop it in a bowl of water with a load of other stuff. In one shop, the cheapest we could find was £9 a plate, and they were seconds!
The strap line for one link to pottery at the Portmerion Seconds Shop actually says “Our Usual Quality At Lower Prices. Shop Unique Pottery Pieces Today!” You probably know what is coming next. How can it be usual quality when it is a second? Unless their usual quality is second grade. But then, it would be their usual quality and it wouldn’t be in a seconds shop. Somebody in the advert department is obviously fluent in Gobbledygook rather than English. And as for the “unique” pieces . . . Unique has one meaning in the dictionary. A unique meaning, in fact. It means there is only one of them. I’d stretch a point to allow them to mean there was only one example in the shop. But there wasn’t. There were dozens, even hundreds of everything. Unique doesn’t mean, rare or unusual or, as in this case, well lit and expensive. It means there is just one. If there are two of them it isn’t unique.
I’m becoming curmudgeonly, so I will stop.
The header picture is from one of our previous visits, as is the bottom one. I did take some others yesterday but will use them later. Stoke has always had an element of decay about it, which has been part of the charm over the years, but this is all disappearing as developers build more and more homes and retail parks.
When we got home I slept, ate and slept again before going to bed. With the addition of a few slivers of TV in my waking moments that was all I did.
Derelict factory in Stoke
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The teapot is a beautiful one, and is very friendly looking. I hope you did find some place to eat while you were out?
We had sausages and oatcakes (pictures will eventually follow). Eating less is good for us. 🙂
Oh, I love that photo of the teapot and the mug which aren’t the same pattern but look so well together.
I think it tends to work because the styles are similar. They had some in the gift shop with mismatched lids, which were much brighter, and it didn’t work.
The lady I worked for when I lived in Mississippi had A LOT of porcelain from the Stoke on Trent area. I took photos and researched every company to put them on the blog (The Mystical Mansion and Garden). Every company had a great story to tell. So, are most of the factories gone now?
Yes, most of them got swallowed up by bigger companies, then the big companies sent their production to the Far East because it’s so much cheaper. Spode used to have a fantastic display of china out, including stuff going back to the 1810s, possibly before, as they started in 1770. I’m told they have some out on display again but we haven’t been.
There is no way I will let you get away with using curmudgeonly incorrectly. If used correctly it could mean waspish, crusty, gruff, ill-humored, ill-humoured, sycophantic, cantankerous, supercilious, humourless, world-weary and condescending. All you have done is to correctly point out the horrible degradation of the English language. All I can say is, “Well said, that man!”
Thank you. That is a fine selection of words, and I should probably be slightly ashamed that they all apply to me.
However, I’m not. 🙂
I like the teapot
It’s Burleigh ware made at the Middleport Pottery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burleigh_Pottery
You are quite right to be a curmudgeon about the misuse of unique. Mrs T goes wild at the misuse of under and over estimate . . .and cobbles when they mean setts.
I didn’t know you could misuse under and over estimate, which probably means I do it. I will remain silent on that one . . .
I also checked up cobbles and setts before replying.Fortunately I had the basics right, but am now a confused by the cobbles we used to have on the streets when I was a child – although thy have rounded tops like river stones they are squared off and fairly regular, so does that make them setts?
Is Stoke where the Great Pottery Throwdown is filmed. That teapot in the top picture is a beauty. It seems to me that prices on everything are through the roof, as the saying goes.
Yes, Stoke is the venue. In fact the tearoom is at the Middleport Pottery where most of the early series were filmed. It has now moved some or all filming to the Gladstone Pottery Museum a few miles away.