On 26 October 1863, the Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart Gladstone arrived in Burslem to lay the foundation stone of a building that had been entirely funded by public subscription, with an estimated cost of £4,000. Four thousand pounds of working-class pottery-town money, raised because a community decided it wanted its own art school and library. The site mattered too. The institute stands on the ground of the old Brick House pottery works, which Josiah Wedgwood himself had rented from 1762 to 1770 - the second of his Burslem factories. A small portion of the original works was woven into the fabric of the new building, like a relic embedded in a reliquary. The institute opened on 21 April 1869, with the School of Art and Science following in October and the Free Library in 1870, the library funded by a penny rate under the Public Libraries Act of 1850.

The basic design was by an architect named Nichols, but the elaborate decoration that defines the building was the work of two men: Robert Edgar and John Lockwood Kipling. The second of those names will sound familiar. Lockwood Kipling was the father of Rudyard Kipling, and he emigrated to India in 1865, while the institute was still half-finished. The facade was not completed until 1871, six years after he had left for Bombay. Look up and you read a small allegory in clay. Around the upper storey the twelve months parade in terracotta relief, each accompanied by its zodiacal sign in mosaic above. Around the middle of the building, ten more terracotta panels lay out the manufacture of pottery, step by step, as though the building itself were a textbook. Over the entrance, three portrait medallions honour men associated with Wedgwood's projects - the sculptor John Flaxman, the scientist Joseph Priestley (who discovered oxygen), and Wedgwood's business partner Thomas Bentley - with a statue of Josiah Wedgwood himself standing above.

Like the institute it modelled itself on in Venice, the Wedgwood Institute proved hard to maintain. The art students left in 1905, when Burslem School of Art got its own building directly opposite. The library moved across the road in 2008 and the council closed it about eighteen months later. The building served briefly as an annexe for Staffordshire University and Stoke-on-Trent College, hosted an exhibition in 2009, and has been unoccupied since. The terracotta absorbed Staffordshire rain and Staffordshire frost for over a century without significant repair, and by the 2010s the institute had landed on Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register, assessed as in poor condition and slowly decaying. Photographs of the empty interior have since circulated widely - peeling plaster, gaping floorboards, the kind of dereliction that makes preservationists wake up at three in the morning.

Restoration work began in February 2015, funded by grant money and coordinated by Stoke-on-Trent City Council with the Prince's Regeneration Trust, now reorganised as the King's Foundation. The plan was to make the building habitable again for start-up businesses. In March 2024, Historic England awarded further funding to make the institute weather-tight and safe to access. Louise Brennan, the Midlands regional director, conceded that finding a new use for it was taking time - but, she said, the building could not be allowed to continue to deteriorate. Essential work on the north-east corner began in January 2026, scheduled to take about six weeks as part of a broader safeguarding programme. The lives that have touched these walls form their own roll call. Oliver Lodge, the scientist who demonstrated wireless telegraphy. Arnold Bennett, the novelist who set his Five Towns books in this landscape. The potters Frederick Hurten Rhead and William Moorcroft, both formative figures in twentieth-century English ceramics, both shaped in part by the rooms behind the terracotta facade.