Tribute to pottery industry

The Lancaster Building in Newcastle under Lyme, was built, in the late 1930s, right in the middle of the town, as an expression of local pride and to indicate the town's modernism.  It's a fine and functional building.
It pays homage to the town's past with a series of roundels on its sides - this one indicates the small, but important, element that pottery played in the industrial life of the borough.

Skips of shards

Burleigh Pottery still occupies a nineteenth century potbank building in the northern end of Stoke-on-Trent, and - thanks to the fact that it shares the old building with the Middleport Pottery Project - one can still go round a lot of it and imagine how it would have been a hundred and fifty years ago.

But the site is still definitely that of a working pottery - as you can see see from the skips of discarded shards round the back...

Figurines in public

Passing along a pavement on a street of terraced houses, I walked by this frontage. There must have been two to three hundred little figurines arranged in front of this particular home.

I was massively impressed.
The owner had obviously decided that the risk of getting pieces stolen or broken was well worth the pleasure of showing them - and thus brightening up the neighbourhood. 
I feel it's a great example; and I wondered if I should be doing something similar.

Kids' ceramic project

I was thinking about yesterday’s post – the one about the marvellous porcelain statuette made in the Potteries – and realised that not only are a lot of pottery skills like that being lost, but that nobody is teaching them any more.

It might come as a shock (it did to me) to realise that pottery is no longer a degree course at Staffordshire University. It has been subsumed into something called ‘3D Design’. Trouble is: few students want to learn pottery skills.

So shocked were some people by this that they started ‘Firing Up’, a ceramic project for schools, which is supported jointly by Staffordshire University’s Design Department and the Crafts Council.
This is some of the kids’ work.

Potteries Venus

The Staffordshire ‘Potteries’didn’t just produce cups and saucers. This beautiful piece, in Parian porcelain, was produced at the Ridgways factory (John Ridgway, Bates & Company – to be exact) in Hanley in 1858. It was based on the statue 'Venus & Cupid' aka Venus Verticordia by the famous sculptor John Gibson

It’s astonishing to me that such a fine piece could be fired from what is basically... clay.

You’ll find this piece in the Industrial Gallery of Birmingham Museum. I guess the Museum sees it as a factory item, not a work of art in its own right. Hmm.