| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| PLACES |
A unique Victorian pottery, unchanged for 100 years, has been saved. David Graham reports
The village of Wrecclesham, near Farnham in Surrey, is described by Pevsner in his Buildings of England as having `a few very battered cottages and a bad church'. The description, however, does not do Wrecclesham justice as, tucked away behind the houses, lies an evocative survival from the Victorian period.
The Farnham Pottery represents the best-preserved example of a Victorian country pottery left anywhere in England, consisting of a rabbit-warren of warm terracotta-coloured brick buildings complete with a single remaining wood-fired bottle kiln. It is still being run by the great-great-grandson of the original founder, but the business has recently fallen upon hard times and the buildings are now in urgent need of repair.
In order to prevent total demolition and re-development with housing, the Farnham (Building Preservation) Trust - a registered charity - has stepped in and bought the site. A programme of historical research and recording work has been undertaken by the Surrey Archaeological Society, in collaboration with the English Royal Commission, and the results have shown what a disaster it might have been if this historical gem had been allowed to disappear.
To enter the buildings is to step back 100 years, for little has changed and even the matchsticks left by potters lighting their pipes 50 years or more ago can still be found pushed into the cracks of the brick-work. Many of the fixtures and fittings are still intact - the base for the steam engine, the home-made wooden shelving, and various safety regulations from the turn of the century - while a multitude of moulds and extrusion plates lie stacked in every corner. This was once a thriving pottery and the decline of recent years has saved it from most of the effects of modernisation.
The Surrey-Hampshire border has a long tradition of commercial pottery production, with its origins in the Roman period. During the Middle Ages and up to the early 19th century the area was the source of a substantial proportion of the cheap domestic wares used in London. Even by the mid-Victorian period a number of country potteries were still functioning and were well described by George Sturt in his 1919 book William Smith, Potter & Farmer, 1790-1858. In the second half of the 19th century, these small enterprises began to be affected by the cheaper mass-produced products of the Midlands, and the industry went into decline until today, when only this one traditional pottery still survives more or less intact.
The Farnham Pottery was founded in 1872 by Absalom Harris, who came from a family with a long history of potting. He was born in 1857 and, as a young man, was apprenticed to George Cobbett, a relative of William Cobbett the politician. After running potteries at Charles Hill and at Alice Holt, south of Farnham, he bought the present site at Clay Hill in Wrecclesham and built the pottery, largely from bricks and fittings made on the spot. The pottery buildings themselves are therefore unique with their home-made bricks, tiles, rainwater pipes and even terracotta window frames, not to mention a fine decorative brick chimney and a number of architectural touches such as the faience image of an owl with outstretched wings over one of the archways.
Absalom, who was also a farmer, bought the property primarily because a fine supply of clean Gault Clay was available on site and the local woodlands provided a ready source of fuel. A small railway was built to bring the red-firing clay from the pits to the door of the pug-mill room, where it was broken down and mixed with local sand and water. This mix was then passed three times through the pug-mill, before it was ready for the potter's wheel. White clay used to make fine wares was obtained from the same pits in the nearby Farnham Old Park as had supplied potters in the medieval and Tudor periods. Indeed this was the same source of clay as was used for the famous 16th century Farnham `grene pottes usually drunke in by the gentlemen of the Temple', mentioned in a letter sent from the Inner Temple and dated 19 August 1594.
In its heyday the pottery employed up to 30 men to provide pots to fill the four working kilns. The pottery had up to seven kick-wheels, some of which were geared to rotate very fast for the production of small items such as flowerpots. The most skilful potters, who were paid for what they produced rather than for their time, could produce three 3-inch plant pots per minute, or more than 1,000 per day. Larger pieces were produced at a slower rotation speed, using devices such as the `slave' wheel powered by an apprentice pushing and pulling a stick attached to a crankshaft. The wares produced were then dried on slatted wooden floors in the main buildings before being fired in one of the kilns.
Each kiln had a loading chamber of about 1,000ft3 and each took about three days to load. Once full, it was fired using coal and then wood to a temperature of about 1000oC. This process took a further three days and the kiln was then allowed to cool for a week before being unloaded. The pottery produced a wide range of domestic and `fancy' wares as well as the bricks, tiles and architectural mouldings. One of the reasons the pottery was so successful was the innovative approach taken by the Harris family. A good example of this followed a visit by Myles Birket Foster, the artist, in 1880, who requested that a copy be made of a French green-glazed garden vase in his collection that had weathered badly.
Absalom Harris experimented for several months before achieving the right glaze, but discovered to his surprise that many of his failures sold well. Following this, some of the 16th century green-glazed vessels (the `grene pottes') from excavations in London were sent for copying and the Harris family soon realised that just one such piece could sell for eight shillings - the same price as 288 small plant-pots. So successful was this innovation that Farnham green-glaze ware was soon being supplied in quantity to shops such as Heal's and Liberty's in London.
This led to a considerable expansion of production and by the early part of this century the pottery was at the heart of the West Surrey Arts and Crafts movement and many of the products were designed in co-operation with leading members of staff from the Farnham School of Art. Well-known customers included Queen Mary, wife of George V, who ordered a number of terracotta garden urns, Lord Tennyson, and Gertrude Jekyll, the turn-of-the-century garden designer and collaborator with Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Much of the equipment used in the pottery was produced on site in a small blacksmith's shop, often cannibalising parts from other machinery. The tile and brick extruding machine, for example, utilised parts from a recycled mechanical hoppacker and was so successful that similar machines were built and exported across the British Empire. Again most of the potter's wheels were made on the spot, as were several of the pug-mills and, surprisingly, much of this equipment not only still exists but is used on a regular basis.
The long-term aim of the Farnham (Building Preservation) Trust is to preserve as much of the existing structure as possible and to maintain the potting tradition, but to augment it with other craft businesses in the now redundant sections of the buildings. It is hoped that the result will be a centre of excellence for the arts and crafts, with a strong emphasis on the historical aspects of the site, perhaps with restoration of the bottle kiln and the provision of a small museum.
David Graham is the Vice-President of the Surrey Archaeological Society. The recording project was helped by a £500 grant from the CBA's challenge fund. Further information on the pottery can be found at the website: http://www.surreyweb.org.uk/farntrust
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1999