Middleport Pottery will provide free access to the bottle oven on the day as well as hosting a ‘Canal Trip, Tour and Walk’ – including a history talk on the Dane narrowboat and a guided tour of Etruria Industrial Museum – at an additional cost – (More details here  https://reformheritage2.beaconforms.com/form/73178c5d)

Elsewhere, Etruria Industrial Museum will open the Calcining Kiln and Mill specially for Potteries Bottle Oven Day (entry £6), with light refreshments available in the tearoom (For information:
https://etruriamuseum.org.uk)

Leaving from Etruria Museum at 2:30pm, ‘Bankside Bottle Ovens’ – A FREE guided walk exploring the oven sites along the Trent & Mersey and Caldon Canals – will be led by Potteries Heritage Society. (Reserve your free place: https://www.potteries.org.uk/bankside-bottle-ovens-reserve)

The route will include canal site bottle oven sites in Shelton, Stoke and Hanley.

The Potteries Bottle Oven Owners Club, formed in 2019 as part of the Stoke-on-Trent Ceramic Heritage Action Zone – a heritage-led regeneration programme delivered by Historic England and Stoke-on-Trent City Council, alongside local and national partners from 2019-2024 –  is a forum for the owners and care-takers of bottle ovens, bringing them together to find solutions to ongoing conservation and maintenance issues.

On behalf of the Club, Bernard Lovatt said: “It is our pleasure to open the Etruria Museum for this special day. Each bottle oven has its own distinctive history and unique story to tell, so we hope local people and visitors to the city will use this opportunity to seek them out and find out more.”

Andy Perkin, who has been supporting the Club on behalf of the Potteries Heritage Society, said: “We are very pleased to see the owners marking Potteries Bottle Oven Day with a range of events and activities. Through the walk, we plan to highlight the crucial role the canals played in the development of the pottery industry.”

More information about the Club includes:

The Clubs aims include: promoting interest in the city’s bottle ovens; supporting the conservation and preservation of bottle ovens and their historic environments; collaborating on projects and events; sharing best practice in maintenance and conservation; and educating local people, staff and visitors.

Membership of the Club, which now includes the owners of the majority of the 50 bottle ovens remaining in the city, covers every type of oven – from well-known examples of up-draught hovel ovens at Middleport Pottery and Gladstone Pottery Museum to Moorland Pottery’s unusual four-chambered muffle kiln in Burslem, as well as calcining kilns spread across the city from Middleport to Etruria to Longton.

The Club continues to work to establish best practice in maintaining these iconic listed structures, sharing experiences, talking to heritage professionals, creating useful guidance documents for its
members, and starting to put that information into practice in the course of repair and maintenance work. Alongside this the Club seeks to promote and celebrate the city’s bottle ovens through events such as Potteries Bottle Oven Day.