Blooming again, by Mervyn Edwards

Over the past few years, a great deal of regeneration work has considerably improved the wonderful community facility that is Burslem Park. Ever since its opening in 1894, visitors have admired the flowers..

Ironically, the park during its early days was inadvertently damaged by some of the same businessmen who had given funds or park furniture towards the project. The trees and shrubs suffered and sometimes died on account of the industrial pollution of the 1890s. The limbs of trees, choked to death by fumes, broke off in high winds. The Parks Committee minutes make reference to some of the offending manufacturers, such as Gibson and Sons who had given two shelters which adorned the terrace. The firm was asked by the Parks Committee to increase the height of its chimney so that the belching smoke might not disperse so much over the park greenery. The Bycars Sanitary Pipe Company in Moorland Road was another firm that was requested to reduce its smoke emissions, but in the end, the committee had to accept that muck was brass in Burslem. Park superintendent John McPhail, who had come from the Lake District, accepted the reality that Potteries smoke was too noxious for the plant species he had tried to cultivate. He consequently grew hardier plants such as privet, holly, wegelia and elm. Happily, horticultural fetes were held at the park from Edwardian times.

Only from the mid 20th century was it possible to grow a wider range of plants in Burslem Park with the increase in gas and electricity firing and smoke control regulations. In 2005, volunteers from the Prince’s Trust helped to restore a waterfall in addition to cutting back hedges and shrubs and planting flowers, enabling Burslem Park to bloom once again.

Arnold Bennett describes the park
(and gets distracted by the Angel, again)

The town park is an idyll in the otherwise prosaic municipal history of the Borough of Bursley, which previously had never got nearer to romance than a Turkish bath. It was once waste ground covered with horrible rubbish-heaps, and made dangerous by the imperfectly-protected shafts of disused coal-pits. Now you enter it by emblazoned gates; it is surrounded by elegant railings; fountains and cascades babble in it; wild-fowl from far countries roost in it, on trees with long names; tea is served in it; brass bands make music on its terraces, and on its highest terrace town councillors play bowls on billiard-table greens while casting proud glances on the houses of thirty thousand people spread out under the sweet influence of the gold angel that tops the Town Hall spire. The other four towns are apt to ridicule that gold angel, which for exactly fifty years has guarded the borough and only been regilded twice. But ask the plumber who last had the fearsome job of regilding it whether it is a gold angel to be despised, and — you will see!
– From Helen with the High Hand