Description:Burslem is situated in the north-west of the City of Stoke-on-Trent, one of the six towns which form the City.
Early forms of Burslem’s name show that it it derives from Burgweard’s Lyme – where Burgweard could be a person’s name or a description meaning fort guardian. The Lyme element appears in several places in north Staffordshire and Cheshire and latest interpretation suggests that it refers to the upland areas, less hospitable to settlement. When was recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086, Burslem was called Barcardeslim. It was not a large village consisting of just four households and one plough team. The other resource mentioned is two acres of alder wood. Its value was 10 shillings.
Through the medieval period, Burslem was not a centre of any importance. It was part of the parish of Stoke on Trent and was subject to the Tunstall manor court. A survey in 1563 reported 30 households for the area served by the chapel of St John. The village was agricultural and did not have good communications. However the occupants of the poor farms had beneath their feet mineral resources, which over the next two centuries produced steady growth into a thriving urban centre.
In 1686 Dr Robert Plot said ‘the greatest pottery they have in Staffordshire is carried on at Burslem …where for making their several sorts of pots, they have as many different sorts of clay which they dig round about the town, all within half a miles distance, the best being found nearest the coal’ . Potting was at first a literal cottage industry, carried on by farmers to supplement their incomes from the poor quality land. As important as the clay was, the coal which was easily exploitable here in the North Staffordshire coalfield came to the surface.
By the early eighteenth century there were several potteries producing large quantities of domestic and everyday ceramics. The prosperity of what was now described as a town encouraged production on increasingly large scale, the growth of housing for workmen and the provision of market buildings. This phase of its development brought Burslem the title of ‘Mother Town’ of the Potteries.
Factories of considerable size, employing hundreds of men were built in this period and the speed of urbanisation meant that the institutions and public amenities suitable for a town had to be created from scratch. An Act of Parliament of 1825 created Commissioners for Burslem with powers to run a police force and pave and light the town. However in 1838 the Commissioners complained that their powers were ‘quite inadequate for the good government of the town’. They were succeeded in 1850 by a Board of Health, with powers to regulate sewage and waste disposal, run the market and repair the roads. The town achieved full self governing status in 1878 when the borough was incorporated.
There was no school in the town until 1740 when a group of citizens established a free school. Most children learned to read and write not at this school but through the Sunday Schools of the Methodist churches. The Hill Top Sunday School boasted over 1,000 pupils in the early nineteenth century. The town supported art and further education with the erection of the magnificent Wedgwood Institute in 1869 and the Burslem School of Art in 1907
There was no M.P. for the town until 1832 when the whole of the Potteries was formed into a constituency, sending two members to Parliament. This early recognition that the six towns had common interests was the start of nearly eighty years of controversy about unifying local government. Although Burslem had been the first of the six towns to grow, by the mid nineteenth century it was no longer the largest. When the proposals for Federation came to a head in 1908, Burslem’s voters rejected the idea in a referendum and the council boycotted the Parliamentary hearings, which eventually approved the creation of the city of Stoke-on-Trent in March 1910.
The town’s fortunes in the modern period have followed those of the pottery industry which created it. The closure of major potteries have led to current attempts at regeneration, which hope to build on the legacy of fine Georgian and Victorian buildings that the town still possesses.