Featured Image: Coalport China Works

This is a shot of Coalport China Works, just a short walk from my house. It was taken at the end of a particularly damp November, and the towpath was covered in a luminous green moss, which was quite distracting. By removing the colour, that distracting green moss becomes a leading line to take the eye through the image.

If you have read my blog post; Secret Ironbridge: Transhipment interchange, you will know that Coalport was a ‘new town’ built in the 1790s to service a wharfage between the Shropshire Canal and the River Severn. At about the same time, entrepreneur John Rose had a china factory built on the same site to take advantage of the distribution opportunities that the new canal and river provided.

The remains of the factory (now a museum) are easily recognisable by the two bottle kilns (the name refers to their shape) used to ‘fire’ the pottery. Their distinct profile created an updraught that accelerated the heat from fires at their base. Bottle kilns were very inefficient, but continued to be used throughout the UK until well into the mid-1900s.

Bottle kilns were a common site in the Ironbridge Gorge; the Coalport site originally had six, but there were many more over the river at the Maws and Craven Dunnill tile works.