Josiah Wedgwood - Stoke, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
N 53° 00.199 W 002° 10.888
30U E 554927 N 5872952
Josiah Wedgwood (1730 - 1795) is buried in the grounds of the Minster Church of St Peter Ad Vincula in Stoke.
Waymark Code: WMV7QF
Location: West Midlands, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 03/10/2017
Views: 7
Josiah Wedgwood was an innovative designer, a manufacturer of high-quality pottery and a campaigner for social reform. He was buried in the grounds outside the original church of St Peter Ad Vincula in Stoke because as a Dissenter he was not allowed to be interred inside.
The Tomb of Josiah Wedgwood I is Grade 11 listed.
The tomb Circa 1795 is in a squared paved area with edge coping probably covering a vault, with a central raised panel inscribed:
Josiah Wedgwood 1730-1795
It is surrounded by black metal railings. (
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Josiah Wedgwood was born in Burslem, Staffordshire, the eleventh and last child of Thomas Wedgwood (d. 1739) and Mary Wedgwood (née Stringer; d. 1766).
Josiah was raised within a family of English Dissenters, he was the grandson of a Unitarian minister and was an active Unitarian. By the age of nine, he was proving himself to be a skilled potter. He survived a childhood bout of smallpox to serve as an apprentice potter under his eldest brother Thomas Wedgwood IV. Smallpox left Josiah with a permanently weakened knee, which made him unable to work the foot pedal of a potter's wheel. As a result, he concentrated from an early age on designing pottery and then making it with the input of other potters.
In his early twenties, Wedgwood began working with the most renowned English pottery-maker of his day, Thomas Whieldon, who eventually became his business partner in 1754. He began experimenting with a wide variety of techniques, an experimentation that coincided with the burgeoning of the nearby industrial city of Manchester. Inspired, Wedgwood leased the Ivy Works in the town of Burslem. From 1768 to 1780 he partnered with Thomas Bentley, a potter of sophistication and astute taste. Over the course of the next decade, his experimentation (and a considerable injection of capital from his marriage to a richly endowed distant cousin) transformed the sleepy artisan works into the first true pottery factory.
Source: Wikipedia - Josiah Wedgwood. (
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