Craft, industry and the built environment · Since 1998
For ninety years the kiln took its material from a bend two kilometres upstream. The bend has moved. What happens to a factory built around a supply that walked away?
The road to the works runs out before the works do. You park where the tarmac gives up and walk the last few hundred metres over ground that crunches, because the ground here is the product: fired seconds, broken headers, a century of not-quite-right.
Inside, the tunnel kiln has not been cold since 1974. Stopping it costs more than running it empty, so it runs, and the men who load it talk about the fire the way farmers talk about weather — as a thing with moods.
The clay came from a bend upstream, dug in winter and left to weather through the year. River bends migrate; this one has moved four hundred metres since the survey, and the seam it once cut through is now under the far bank, under a road, under somebody else's title.
Management has known for six years. The options are all expensive and one of them is closing.
Two hundred kilometres east there is clay of nearly the same composition. Nearly is doing a lot of work in that sentence: the difference is a shade of red that the conservation officers on three listed terraces will notice immediately.