The Wedgwood family acquired the Barlaston estate in the 1930s, the same period in which Josiah Wedgwood V was planning the move of pottery production from old Etruria to a modern, purpose-built factory in this rural setting. The college opened in February 1945, in the months before the European war ended, inside Barlaston Hall, a country house on the estate. The hall did not last long as a college building. Coal mining operations under the parkland, combined with a geological fault, opened diagonal cracks across the walls; the hall was structurally compromised and would later need a major rescue restoration of its own. The college moved out into Victorian and Edwardian buildings in the village, where it would remain for the rest of its working life. It joined the Adult Residential Colleges Association, offered short courses in literature, languages, political science, history, and the visual arts, and built up a non-circulating library of 15,000 volumes for residents to use.

What set Wedgwood Memorial College apart was its long romance with Esperanto, the constructed international language invented by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. From 1960 until 2011, the college ran a week-long Esperanto summer school every August, plus a weekend course on Esperanto theatre each January and a residential Esperanto language weekend each October. The unbroken sequence of summer schools, more than half a century long, became one of the largest sustained Esperanto teaching programmes in the English-speaking world. The driving force behind the connection was Horace Barks, Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent, who championed the language locally and steered the college towards it. The Esperanto Association of Britain made its headquarters at Esperanto House on the college's Estoril site, though it has since relocated its operations online and to London. The Montagu C. Butler Library, named after a Quaker schoolmaster who was one of Britain's foremost Esperantists, lives in the same building, holding what is believed to be the largest Esperanto collection in the country.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council owned and operated the college throughout its working life, and in March 2012 the council closed it as part of the austerity-era retrenchment that hollowed out many of Britain's adult education institutions. The 2011 Esperanto summer school turned out to have been the last. Eight rooms that had been let for weddings, parties, and small conferences fell silent. The Adult Residential Colleges Association lost one of its most distinctive members. What survived was the Esperanto presence. Esperanto House remained open and active. The Butler Library kept its doors. The Esperanto Association of Britain still subsidises learners attending Esperanto programmes elsewhere, on condition that they first complete an introductory course - a quiet continuation of the educational mission that Horace Barks had built into the place six decades earlier.

A small but persistent confusion follows this college around. In Burslem, about six miles north, stands the Wedgwood Institute, a Venetian Gothic Grade II* listed building from the 1860s with a terracotta facade and a public-subscription history of its own. The Burslem building is sometimes called the Wedgwood Memorial Institute, which is close enough to Wedgwood Memorial College to muddle the record. They are entirely separate institutions, founded eighty years apart for different reasons, but both honour the same potter who pulled this region into the Industrial Revolution. The college's closure left Barlaston with the factory, the museum, the village, and the Esperanto library - a slightly thinner cultural ecosystem than before, but one in which the international language Zamenhof devised as a tool for world peace can still be studied in rural Staffordshire.