Stoke on Trent

Stoke-on-Trent breaks the pattern of the county around it. Where much of Staffordshire is given over to villages, farmland and the Peak District's southern fringes, Stoke is a proper city built from six former towns fused together by the pottery industry. Bottle kilns still punctuate the skyline in places, and the terraced streets and canal routes tell you this was once one of the country's great manufacturing centres. It is a working city rather than a picture-postcard one, and that is a large part of its appeal.

The city's pottery heritage is unmissable, and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery is the obvious place to start, with its ceramics collections telling the story of the industry that shaped the place. Beyond that history, Stoke has built up a strong line in indoor activity and adventure: Awesome Walls Climbing Stoke and Kilnworx Climbing Centre for climbers, Kidsgrove Ski Centre and Stoke Ski Centre for skiing and snowboarding, XPVR Virtual Reality XPerience for something more high-tech, and Adventure Mini Village for families. Foxfield Railway adds a heritage steam railway into the mix, a reminder that this is a city with layers of industrial history to explore alongside its newer attractions.

Stoke-on-Trent works best as a destination for people who want a city with substance and a bit of grit rather than a chocolate-box Staffordshire village. It rewards a short stay well: a day or two around the pottery museums and shops, an afternoon on a climbing wall or ski slope, and evenings spent working through its curry houses and cafes, with the wider Staffordshire countryside never far away if you want to head out of town.