STOKED FOR STOKE

There’s almost a Tom Jones effect that happens when you tell women of a particular age that you’re off to visit England’s famous potteries region. My mother, for example, starts shaking me with an excitement I’ve not seen before or since, begging me to ‘tell her all about Wedgwood – one more time’, while her friends demand (with an almost frothy frenzy) that I find out why ceramics are so unaffordable when it’s really all ‘just a bunch of clay’. And just as I’m beginning to get excited about my trip to Stoke-on-Trent, my English husband says, “Stoke? Why would anyone want to go to Stoke?” Spoken like a man who left the country a good 20 years ago.

Admittedly, Stoke-on-Trent – an industrial city teeming with decrepit warehouses and wastelands – is never going to win any prizes for beauty. Pulling up into the outskirts where everything is neon and graffiti-tagged, there’s little indication that the city was once a rural farming community before locals