The Potteries Bottle Oven


Huge, towering and complex brick-built bottle ovens and kilns, integral to a potbank and an essential tool in pottery manufacture, were once the dominant feature of the Potteries landscape.

Bottle ovens landscape, in art
"Seven Sisters"
 J & G Meakin Ltd., Eastwood Works, Lichfield Street, Hanley.
Terry Woolliscroft Collection



Bottle ovens and kilns facts. At their peak, in the 1930s, around 2,100 existed in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. Most of the potters' bottle ovens were fired once a week, some twice. At each firing a minimum of 10 tons of coal was burnt in each oven. Some very large ovens, with up to 14 firemouths, used over 30 tons per firing. Each firing could last over 72 hours, sometimes longer in difficult conditions. 

Bottle Ovens 1954
 46 seconds from the film called 'The Peak District'


Thick, black, choking smoke always filled the air. 
Sooty smuts clung to everything.




But a change, initiated in the first quarter of the 20th century was building momentum as manufacturers searched for more efficient and cleaner ways to fire their products.  Town gas, oil and electricity were taken on to fuel innovative intermittent and continuous firing tunnel kilns. The use of coal fired bottle ovens and kilns began to decline.

The Clean Air Act of 1956  finally put a stop to their use and sealed the fate of the traditional coal-fired oven. Pottery manufacturers were forced to change but allowed seven years to fully adapt to the alternative methods and fuels.

By 1960 there were less than 200 operable coal-fired bottle ovens.

By July 1963 all bottle ovens and kilns were redundant, although just a few were used after the deadline. The skills of the people who used them were redundant too. Their skills faded away. The rush to demolish, encouraged by the local council, began in earnest.

In 2023 fewer than 50 precious examples remain standing complete with their bottle-shaped chimney. 

Of these only 30  are potters' ovens, used for biscuit or glost firing. 18  of these are within a very short walk of Gladstone Pottery Museum in Longton, the southernmost of Stoke-on-Trent's six towns. 

Interestingly, throughout the whole of the UK, fewer than 100 pottery oven and kiln structures remain. More details here>