Jobs in Stoke-On-Trent

Strength United is More Powerful - a slogan that is at the heart of Stoke-On-Trent. 'Stoke' is a city and unitary authority area in Staffordshire together with the neighbouring boroughs of Newcastle-under-Lyme and Staffordshire Moorlands.

Stoke-on-Trent is the home of the pottery industry in England and is commonly known as the Potteries, with the local residents known as Potters or 'Clayheads'. Formerly a primarily industrial conurbation, it is now a centre for service industries and distribution centres. The name Stoke is taken from the town of Stoke-upon-Trent, the original ancient parish, with other settlements being chapelries.

Stoke derives from the Old English stoc, a word that simple means ‘place’. An early proposal for a federation took place in 1888, when an amendment was raised to the Local Government Bill which would have made the six towns into districts within a county of ‘Staffordshire Potteries’. It was not until 1910 that the six towns were brought together. The county borough of Hanley, the municipal boroughs of Burslem, Longton, and Stoke, together with the urban districts of Tunstall and Fenton now formed a single county borough of Stoke-on-Trent. The county borough was abolished in 1974, and Stoke became a non-metropolitan district of Staffordshire.

Since the 17th century, the area has been almost exclusively known for its industrial-scale pottery manufacturing. Renowned companies such as Royal Doulton, Dudson Ltd, Spode, Wedgwood, Minton and Baker & Co. Were established and based there. The Stoke mining industry also set several national and international records. Wolstanton Colliery, when modernised, had the deepest mining shafts in Europe at 3,197 ft. In 1933, Chatterley Whitfield Colliery became the first Colliery in the country to mine one million tons of coal. In the 1980s Florence Colliery in Longton repeatedly set regional and national production records; in 1992 the combined Trentham Superpit was the first mine in Europe to produce 2.5 million saleable tonnes of coal.

The city's ceramics collection is housed in the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley, Etruria Industrial Museum, on the Cauldon Canal, and Gladstone Pottery Museum in a former potbank in Longton are dedicated to the city's industrial heritage. The £10 million Wedgwood Museum visitor centre opened in the firm's factory in Barlaston in October 2008. The Dudson Centre in Hanley is a museum of the family ceramics business, which is partly housed in a Grade II listed bottle kiln. There are also smaller factory shops, such as Royal Stafford in Burslem, Moorcroft in Cobridge and Emma Bridgewater in Hanley.

The city's main theatre is the 1,603-person capacity Regent Theatre, which is in Hanley. Nearby is the main concert hall, the Victoria Hall. The purpose-built theatre in the round New Vic Theatre is just outside the city's boundary in Newcastle-under-Lyme. The major art gallery is The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, located in Hanley. It contains a collection of fine ceramics, a rotating programme of exhibitions and a permanent collection. In 2010, it became one of the permanent homes of the Staffordshire Hoard, the most important collection of Anglo-Saxon gold.

Stoke-On-Trent is home to a number of celebrities also, such as Robbie Williams, Neil Morrissey, Anthea Turner, Jeff Kent, Peter Whelan and Charlotte Higgins.