Smoky Stoke

This is a photograph, dated 1932, of the town I call home. It is a scene of Burslem, one of the six towns that amalgamated to become The City Of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. Stoke was called Smoky Stoke with good reason. I lived in this kind of atmosphere for four years as an infant before my family moved into the countryside and the idyllic village of Cheddleton.

Those early years had quite an effect on me as I had many bronchial attacks and bouts of pneuminia before shaking of these stresses of early years.

In the 30s, the bottle ovens were coal fired to produce the chinaware there. Houses also used coal as a heating fuel. Later, the coal fired ovens were replaced with natural gas firing, and houses switched to cleaner fuels. Today, Stoke is as clean as any other city.