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This year's Heritage Open Days festival in Stoke-on-Trent will benefit from the Society's support following months of meetings and workshops with the venues, hosts and facilitators that make the City's offer among the best in the country. 

Our aim was to get as many heritage groups participating in a diverse programme that spanned the long weekend. The festival, which runs from 7th to 10th September was officially launched at Spode Works on 31st August (see above). Over twenty organisations took part in the planning meetings which began at the end of last year.

This year's leaflet details 26 separate events including those facilitated by our friends at Middlepport Pottery, Etruria Industrial Museum, Stoke Minster, Ceramic City Stories, Ford Green Hall, Spode, Bethesda, and Stoke-on-Trent Museums and Parks. Potteries Heritage Society is directly involved in three separte events. On Thursday 7th September we are teaming up with Etruria Boat Group for Stories From Historic Narrowboats, on Friday 8th PHS's Andy Perkin and Ecologist Nicola Farrin will lead a walk exploring Heritage & Nature in the Potteries, and on Sunday 10th Andy will also the leading a Guided Heritage Canoe Trail from Northwood to Stockton Brook.

A group of Sheffield architecture students have been exploring ways of reimagining Spode Works and its surrounding environment. Studio Temporal Places saw 12 individual students investigate Stoke-On-Trent’s heritage and explore a series of creative possibilities for its future. 

The studio’s proposals respond to contemporary issues whilst recognising the significance of the past, engaging strongly with the existing urban fabric of Spode Works and the surrounding Stoke town centre, whilst drawing upon the Potteries’ distinctive sense of place.

The Big Works, a thesis project carried out by Joe Ingham, a masters student at the University of Sheffield’s School of Architecture, was directly inspired by conversations with members of Potteries Heritage Society. A full article and pictures detailing Joe's work can be found here.

Big Works Arrival

Our Revealing Voices project is gathering momentum with our fully-equipped studio open in Stoke, regular deliveries of digitised audio files and a team of regular audio archeologists.

Following our official launch at the Brampton Museum in November, we have been assembling the equipment needed for the project, including computers, headphones, MP3 players, an audio-visual system and a megaphone. We have also been kitting out the studio with furniture and storage facilities.

Meanwhile, over 400 reel-to-reel tapes were taken to Greatbear in Bristol to be digitised. The company has been busy over the past few months, loading up tapes and producing the digital formats that are used for archiving and listening so that they can be catalogued. Batches of the resulting files are regularly dispatched back to us on flash drives. Over two-thirds of the files have now been returned.

As part of the Stoke-on-Trent's European City of Sport status for 2016, PHS was approached to work in partnership on an exciting project to create the city's Heritage Canoe Trail. The Council's officers, who led the project, teamed up with Canal & River's Trust and British Canoeing - to bring about the physical improvements needed on the route - and a group of enthusiasts from the Potteries Paddlers to help design and test the route. PHS's role was to contribute the heritage text that narrates the route and identifies places of historical interest along the way.

The 20-mile trail runs from Westport Lake on the Trent & Mersey Canal and takes in the whole of the Caldon Canal's main line to Froghall. But, as tackiling the full trail in one go would give the most ardent paddler pause for thought, the accompanying guide provides a list of access points and suggests a number of shorter trips. The guide also identifies camp sites and other stopping points along the way, as well as safety tips and other useful information for those taking to the water.

Potteries Heritage Society is to receive a grant of £51,300 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting project, “Revealing Voices: North Staffordshire”. Supported thanks to National Lottery players, the project focuses on saving a unique collection of tape recordings made in the 1970s and 80s by former radio producer, jazz musician and canals enthusiast, Arthur Wood. The project will digitise and make available hundreds of archive recordings of local people talking about local topics, with a series of events based on the recordings, culminating in an exhibition in 2018.

The project will enable local people to be involved in rediscovering the content of these historic recordings. People will have the chance to be the first to listen to and catalogue the recordings, and to help share them with North Staffordshire communities over the next 2 years. Potteries Heritage Society will work with a team of partners – Staffordshire & Stoke-on-Trent Archives Service, the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, and Staffordshire University – to train volunteers, host events and offer work experience opportunities. Local community and arts groups will help run workshops and events for schools and interest groups.

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