I have visited the Potteries just the once. On 6 March 1965, I appeared as a stand-up comedian at Mr Smith’s Club in Stoke-on-Trent. It was a furtive night-time visit — I was paid £12 for my trouble — and I fear I hardly took in my surroundings which, according to this book, were then in the process of being robbed of their smoky, sooty, smoggy charms and re-dressed in the dreary modernity which has now been inflicted on all Britain’s industrial landscapes.

Paul Johnson has the advantage over me. He spent his childhood in this lost world and fell in love with the buildings bearing four generations of smoke, the railways, the inhabitants who emitted ‘a sickly-sweet geriatric pong’ and, above all, the flames and sparks which rose into the night sky from the hundreds of ‘pot banks’ he could see from his bedroom window.

In fact he now describes this lurid place as ‘a garden of Eden’ and the 1930s as a golden age. Front doors, he tells us, were left unlocked, religion flourished and the prison population was only about five per cent of what it is today.

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