Stoke-on-Trent, often called the Potteries, was created in 1925 from six towns and grew into one of the world's leading producers of pottery and ceramics; the many factories, known as pot banks, were the area's largest employer. One of the iconic features of the skyline was the great number of bottle kilns — the bottle shape is in fact the chimney, up to seventy feet high, with the kiln for firing inside it. At the peak there were over two thousand in use; fewer than fifty are left standing, almost all neglected. It was against that backdrop of a declining industry that the author set out in the early 1980s to record the structures.