Cliffe Vale, Staffordshire
| Cliffe Vale | |
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 The Cliffe Vale Pottery building in 2015 |
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 Cliffe Vale
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| Cliffe Vale shown within Staffordshire | |
| Population | 400 |
| OS grid reference | SJ872465 |
| Unitary authority | |
| Ceremonial county | |
| Region | |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | STOKE-ON-TRENT |
| Postcode district | ST4 |
| Dialling code | 01782 |
| Police | Staffordshire |
| Fire | Staffordshire |
| Ambulance | West Midlands |
| EU Parliament | West Midlands |
| UK Parliament | |
Cliffe Vale is a district of the city of Stoke-on-Trent, and lies to the immediate south of Etruria and just west of Basford and Hartshill. Cliffe Vale is in the valley of the Fowlea Brook, now better known as Etruria Valley. There are industrial and employment uses along the A500, and new residential developments along the Trent and Mersey Canal. The Shelton New Road (A53) passes through from east to west. The area is sometimes called Cliff Vale (with no 'e') by the city Council, and is part of the Hartshill electoral ward.
The Roman road called Rykeneld Street passed directly through the Cliffe Vale area, although the exact route it ran along is unknown. Cliffe Vale takes its name from having been the 'Hay of Clive', part of a Norman deer hunting park that survived as such well into the 15th century. The lower Cliffe Vale section of the park - between Shelton Old Road and Etruria Road - was probably deforested sometime in the 15th century. The more elevated core of the hunting park became a landed estate and farm, and it is marked on the 1st edition six-inch (152 mm) Ordnance Survey map (circa 1860) as "Cliff Ville". The park survived into the 20th century as a large wooded area, now run as a local nature reserve under the name of Hartshill Park. The modern Hartshill Park overlooks the modern Cliffe Vale area.
The Trent and Mersey Canal was cut north-south through Cliffe Vale in the 1770s. What is now the West Coast Main Line railway track was built in the mid-1850s. There was a Cliffe Vale railway station, but this closed in 1865. In the Victorian era the area toward the canal specialised in carpentry, making wooden railway carriages at Cockshute sidings and narrowboats at the canal, while the area west of the train lines (Brick Kiln Lane) specialised in brick making.
A new ideal 'model' factory, Cliffe Vale Pottery, was built by T.W. Twyford in 1887, and his factory manufactured the world's first flushing toilets and other innovative sanitaryware for over 100 years. The Twyfords works closed in 1994, and moved to a purpose-built factory at Alsager. The nearby Armitage Shanks sanitaryware pottery, established at the Excelsior Works in Cliffe Vale from 1912, closed in 2007 and moved to a new factory at Middlewich. This closure brought to an end 120 years of sanitary innovation at Cliffe Vale, innovations that rapidly spread around the world and which have changed the way billions of people live.
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Wikipedia