Beautiful Toilets here doth the Minstrel scan,
All took his fancy, especially the Swan;
I breath’d the airs of other years, and did seem
To sail with th’ Immortal Swans adown ye Muses
stream.
From “Ode to Messers Burgess and Leigh, Earthenware Manufacturers”, by James Torrington Spencer Lidstone, 1866.
I suppose the best that can be said for this opening stanza, published in The Thirteenth Londoniad (1866) is that pottery really does inspire some people…
The above-referenced Messers Burgess and Leigh were Frederick Rathbone Burgess and William Leigh, who established a pottery firm bearing their names in 1862, operating out of the Central Pottery in Burslem (now demolished, but once standing behind the New Inn in the Market Place in Burslem). In 1889, they constructed a “model” pottery works on new ground alongside the Trent and Mersey Canal. The fresh site allowed them to build a complex of buildings in a logical and economic manner, with the manufacturing process dictating the layout and arrangement of the buildings.
It is this complex – the Middleport Pottery – which still survives, and which, since 1889, has been in operation under the Burgess & Leigh name. In 2009 the site received a grant from the Princes Regeneration Trust for the restoration of the nineteenth-century complex of buildings – including its surviving bottle oven.
Do you know what a fettler does?
This is where I’ll be working for the next few months, producing comics and other graphics for the new interpretation and education centre at Middleport. I’ve described the place as a real gem – and so is the job. So often in archaeology one is working with a culture and way of life many, many times removed from the present day. Trying to get across social, technological and cultural concepts often thousands of years old to a contemporary audience can be a real challenge.
At Middleport, however, the historical and archaeological material stands directly alongside the contemporary processes on show in the modern factory. When we talk about a fettler, tissue transfer or thimbles in a nineteenth-century context, we can then point across the modern factory and show the same jobs, equipment and processes as an example.
The comics and graphics I’m producing will draw on this parallel – I’ll be working not only with the interpretation and presentation of the Victorian/Edwardian material, but also with their modern equivalents. There’s the usual site graphics to produce, but also a series of short comics and stand-alone comic graphics about the jobs and manufacturing processes in both 1889 and 2014.
I’ll use the phrase once more: a real gem of a project. It’s not often that one gets this kind of opportunity in archaeological visualisation. I don’t think I’ll manage to compose an ode to the Pottery’s toilets, but I certainly do feel inspired.
john g. swogger 