Monday 20 April (Indoor Meeting): 'How geology made the Potteries'. Speaker: Bernard Besly (Retired Independent Consultant - Keele, Staffordshire).
The importance of geology in the industrial and urban development of North Staffordshire is usually reduced to a truism. Workable clays occurring with hot burning, long-flame coal gave the early potters a unique set of resources, and – in consequence - the pottery towns are developed along the line of their outcrop.
But why did this happen in North Staffordshire rather than the many other coalfield areas that have ample clay and coal? This talk intends to address some of the questions that underlie this set of generalisations. What is so special about the clay? What is “long flame coal” and why was it important for the pottery industry? Did any other geological circumstances lead to dominance of the Stoke area rather than other British Coalfields that also would appear to contain the magical ingredients of coal and clay?

To answer these questions, we need investigate the wider geological history and context:
• The controls on Carboniferous basin evolution that led to the deposition of unusual Coal Measures facies associations of thick palaeosols and algal rich coals;
• the roles of late Carboniferous climate and Variscan deformation in generating kaolinite dominated clays and red-beds of ‘lateritic’ character; and finally
• the ways in which Tertiary and Quaternary events controlled the areas of outcrop that allowed the early industrialists to become established in specific areas of the present city of Stoke-on-Trent.

Bernard Besly moved to Keele University in 1976 to do his PhD on the sedimentology of the Etruria Formation. His career was largely spent working as a sedimentologist in the oil industry, initially with Shell and subsequently as a freelance. Throughout this period he has continued to study the Coal Measures and related Formations in the Midlands, occasionally for money but mainly as a hobby.
Click here for a Google map for The Lamp Tavern.