Friday March 21 : Visit to Trentham Gardens, Trentham, Staffordshire.

The recommend visit to Trentham Gardens was very much enjoyed even in between the heavy rain showers!

Trentham was until 1907 the country-seat of the Dukes of Sutherland, who abandoned it in that year because of pollution of the adjacent River Trent by the china-factories of Stoke. In 1911 most of the mansion itself was demolished, and its wonderful grounds then entered a long period of neglect - from which they’ve only recently emerged, as a result of the largest landscape-garden restoration project in Europe.

The 700 acres of wooded ‘Capability’ Brown parkland, 67-acre lake and recreated ‘italianate’ formal-gardens were looking their best once more.

Saturday March 22 : T.O.C. 5th Anniversary AGM at Ingestre Hall, Stafford.

For the benefit of people reading this new to Talbots, Ingestre Hall was the ancestral-home of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Talbot, founder and first Chairman of Clement Talbot Ltd. Originally built between 1603 and 1613, it was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1882 - but the Earl (then a young man of just 21) ordered it to be rebuilt, externally, to exactly its pre-fire appearance; internally, it’s for obvious reasons late-Victorian.

Its grounds contain landscape-gardens by ‘Capability’ Brown; the only church outside London by Britain’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren; a classical orangery by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, architect of the earliest neo-Grecian buildings in Western Europe; and, finally, the grandiose neo-Jacobean “New Stables” (by the same architect who rebuilt the Hall after the fire), created to accommodate the Earl’s 50 polo-ponies (!), as well as his carriages and the horses that pulled them.

Approx 65 members converged for the Yellow Drawing Room for tea/coffee, followed by the tour of the Hall, church & grounds which were very much appreciated by members with the tour conducted by TOC member James Fack.

Guy Gregory looking the part doing a great trade in the new lines of TOC regalia while outside the changing weather from bright sunshine and sudden hail storms indicated that we were in the month of March!

Sunday March 23 :

An action-packed day, taking in Gladstone Pottery Museum in Longton and St Giles's Roman Catholic Church in Cheadle. Members and friends joined guided tours of Gladstone Museum, which is the only original Victorian china-factory left in this country - with bottle-kilns, cobbled courtyards, unmodernized workshops, very impressive, but something as impressive followed.

The visit to A.W.N. Pugin’s masterpiece, Cheadle R.C. Church - built for John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, between 1841 and 1846. From scarlet doors with life-sized golden ‘lions rampant’ (taken from the Shrewsbury coat-of-arms), to an interior more lavish than that of the House of Lords by the same architect, the whole thing is utterly, gloriously, over-the-top: See a 360 degree pictures by visiting the website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/360/stgiles/index.shtml

The tour between the two different attractions also took in some of the best countryside lanes and Chris and Martin enjoying the ford very much to finish the weekend for a pub lunch in Tutbury.

Congratulations to the organisers and members who attended and made quite a unique 5th year anniversary.