Houses with style

I can't help thinking that these decorative porch tiles are lovely - and worth preserving.  It's not unusual to see them in older houses in Stoke-on-Trent, though there are fewer as householders often pull them out nowadays; I saw these in Stanley Street in Tunstall, in a row of late Victorian houses.

Yes, the arrangement is a bit predictable, being all in patterns of squares and rectangles, but - can you imagine modern housing estates incorporating anything like so darned attractive as these?  They just add... some style.

This post was featured on the City Daily Photo's Theme Day pages

'Heroic' Minton tiles

You can see Minton ceramic tiles all over the world to this day.  Their great era was the ninetenth-century, and many great Victorian buildings, especially in the British Empire, used Minton tiles for floors and for wall-decoration.
Minton's factory was based in north Staffordshire of course; and each time I see Minton work, wherever it is, I get a glow of Staffordshire-satisfaction.

Minton work can be seen at the so-called Postman's Park in London in the 'Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice' loggia.  The memorial remembers some forty 'ordinary people' who died trying to save others. 
It's actually very moving.  Poor Frederick was killed exactly 146 years ago, but the prosaic dedication still has a resonance.

And the Art-Nouveau tiles are very fine indeed.

Regeneration

‘Regeneration’ (which, a cynic might say, is a modern form of slum clearance) is rabid in Stoke-on-Trent. Over the past few years, there have been great swathes of nineteenth-century homes and factories knocked down in a quest for a better and customised future.

Of course, a lot that is good goes too. Old people have to leave properties they’ve lived in much of their lives, and a unique industrial landscape is disappearing - though (to be honest), it wasn’t much-loved.

One thing that will be missed, as part of this familiar environment, is – the porch tiles. Terraced homes in the Potteries have some really interesting decorative tiles, which no doubt will be smashed to pieces as the bulldozers move in.

Swastika at Brewood

The swastika symbol is now so associated with Nazism that there is a feeling of distaste whenever one sees it.
So, it’s quite a shock to see it in the design of the floor-tiles in a church - as here, in the parish church in Brewood.

Of course, what we sometimes forget is that the swastika is an ancient, very widespread symbol, which is used quite innocently all over the world - and in fact was innocently used all over Europe too, right up to the 1930s. (The English writer Rudyard Kipling even had it as his personal symbol, until it became inappropriate).
It has lots of meanings, though sometimes it was just decorative, like here at Brewood.

The tiles you see were probably installed in Brewood in the early 1900s.

There is also a strange myth that the Nazi version of the swastika, which is generally left-facing, like this one at Brewood, was deliberately faced in the reverse way to the ancient swastika. In fact the ancient swastika could face either left or right.


Links: Brewood Parish Church / Meaning of the Swastika