Opening impressions… a complete but decaying pottery in Derbyshire, which used to make tableware. The perimeter is overgrown, with flowering cherries and ornamental shrubs tangling themselves up in the spiky fence and shooting from the gutters of some tumbledown outbuildings. Set back behind steel gates barricaded with dirt and concrete is the pottery, its four bottle kilns poking through the roofs of a cluster of brick-built sheds. Around them, scrap iron, rusting machinery and pallets of rotting sacks have been dumped. It looks like this place has been abandoned. Not quite, but firstly comes some historical context… Background taken from this interesting site – http://www.derek-green.com/tg_green01.htm
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Thomas Goodwin Green was born in Lincolnshire in 1822, and after getting married in 1862 to the sister of the famous cartoonist John Tenniel, whilst on honeymoon he met Henry Wileman, who had a small pottery at Church Gresley. Wileman’s pottery was built originally in 1790, but the owner was set on retiring, so Green bought the business and moved to the area. Despite having no previous experience as a potter, he learned the process – nearly going bankrupt in the process. At that time, it was a small craft pottery, but it grew in parallel with Green's skill and ambitions for it. From 1863 on, it remained under the control of the Green and King families until 1964. In 1871, Green decided to make white earthenware, which the neighbouring potters of Stoke had enjoyed a lot of success with, and he decided to build a new “white” pottery adjacent to the existing one.
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Green also decided to dig his own brick clay, build a brick kiln, sink a small coal mine on his own land in order to get coal to burn his home-made bricks. This DIY spirit was essential due to the poor transport of the day, so Green tried to be self-sufficient and extended this to milling his own clay, making stilts and saggers (which hold the pieces in place inside the kilns) and so forth. The founder died in 1902 and the pottery passed to his relations who, despite various setbacks, decided to electrify the works just before WW1. Modernisation came slowly, because the pottery's former stock-in-trade ("yellow ware") died out, although in its place came Cornish Kitchenware, created in 1924. This finer tableware necessitated careful quality control, and careful calculations in mixing and blunging the clay bodies, where exactly the right proportions of clay, flint, stone, bone and other constituents is essential.
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Likewise, the recipe for the blue slip needed to make the blue stripes on the “Cornish Kitchenware” was cherished and carefully guarded. It was so-called as an empolyee said it reminded her "of the clear blues and white-tipped waves of Cornwall": the stripes were applied by turning the green ware on a lathe. Thanks to Cornishware, the works made a decent profit during the interwar era, and although there were further token efforts to modernise, including the installation of a producer gas-fired Tunnel Kiln in 1938, the pottery missed out on major investment after the war, because the kitchenware it produced didn't justify the investment of hundreds of thousands of pounds in automated kilns. At its peak, TG Green’s had a workforce of over 600, but this declined gradually post-war.
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However, the Tunnel kiln was a success meantime, in that each kiln car could be slowly loaded up and sent through the kiln, taking some 15 hours to travel through the 144 ft long tunnel – much faster than stacking the ware inside a bottle kiln, then waiting for it to go through a firing cycle of several days.*The same technology was used in brickworks such as Inchcoonans, Manuel, Jawcraigs and others which I’ve posted reports on in previous years. As often happens to a business, TG Green came to a turning-point, and the management was forced to invest or die: the firm entered a downward spiral as its traditional markets shrank, until a receiver was appointed in 1965. The firm's downfall was caused in part by the Clean Air Act of 1956, which forced the closure of the coal-fired Bottle kilns, and the conversion to electirc firing. The receiver succeeded in selling the firm in 1967, to the Freemans, who controlled it for the next 20 years. Cornishware was successful, but they sold out to Cloverleaf in 1987; that company struggled and was taken over in 2001 by Mason Cash, who duly went into liquidation in 2004.
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At the eleventh hour, The Table Top Company bought TG Green's, with one of the Freemans at the helm. They made a long-needed investment in new kilns and machinery, then expanded the Cornishware range, re-introducing another design of blue with white spots called "Domino" in September 2005. Things finally looked up for TG Greens. Yet the death knell came with another liquidation in July 2007, after which the works closed for the last time. Today, the factory is still packed with partly-fired pottery, transfers and moulds. The racks are loaded with clayware that will never be finished: bowls, jugs and ewers which should have been put to use but instead will probably end up being dashed into skips. Already, the refractory linings of the modern gas tunnel kilns have been stripped, and those firebricks are piled up on the pottery’s floor, beside smashed-up pyrometers, and pyrotenax cabling ripped from its terminals.
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Closing thoughts … for somewhere closed relatively recently, the natural decay has set in rapidly. The pottery’s warren-like layout is useful as it offers up new perspectives: the sheds were built around the old bottle kilns, and the new tunnel kilns were fitted into the buildings much later, so there are several layers of architecture here, including some beautiful brick corbels in the kiln walls. Despite TG Greens’ popularity, there is always something fresh to see around each corner, including someone emerging from the door in the teapot once I’d left the site… and after I visited, I spotted a press release from a year ago – “TG Green is considering plans to set up a new Cornishware “micro-pottery” factory in Swadlincote over the next year, creating jobs for about 15 workers at its former site”. Perhaps this isn’t the end of the line for this old crock?
Cheers to Havoc for the helpful info.