A Longton-born artist is marking Stoke-on-Trent’s centenary by handcrafting 100 miniature bottle ovens – and each one is uniquely different.
Chris Twigg, who now lives in Lincoln, said his hometown and family’s heritage working in the pottery industry inspired the project.
Each kiln measures 21cm high and can be wall-mounted or stood on its base. Buyers can customise the weathering – so that it appears from ‘old but in good condition’ to ‘abandoned and decaying’ – choose between wooden or metal doors, and select a sign for the front, such as Keep Out or Dangerous Building.
Chris said: “Longton is my hometown and I’ve got childhood memories of my grandparents, mum and dad working in pottery firms there in the 1980s. To me, Longton feels like one of best places to go to get an appreciation of what the old pottery industry would have looked like in its heyday.
“I live in Lincoln now, but I come back to Stoke regularly to visit my family and I like to keep in touch with what’s going on across the city. Making these miniature bottle kilns has put me in touch with lots of other Stokies who live across the UK and around the world too, and it’s lovely to know that our culture of oatcakes and bottle ovens has reached to all corners of the planet.”
Chris, pictured above, who started model-making in the mid-1980s, said he wanted to stimulate conversations about the city’s past, present and future through his creative work.
He said: “2025 is going to be a very special year for the city and I like to provoke conversation with my creative work, so I had an idea to present the bottle kiln in context of not only celebrating 100 years of our heritage but also in thinking about the next 100 years – where are we headed and how our industriousness and creativity might play in all of that.
“Then the number of 100 suggested itself to me for a limited edition in celebration. Because in my work I focus on photo-realism it means there’s a lot of detailing for me to paint in each bottle oven, so I was interested to set myself this challenge of doing it 100 times to create 100 uniquely different designs.
“I also thought, in a more light-hearted way, that it would be fun and fabulous for Stoke on Trent to get some new bottle ovens back in the city, if only in miniature.”
Although not based on one specific site, Chris said the design ‘typifies the classic bottle oven shape’. His personal favourites are the twin bottle ovens at Commerce Street works in Longton, which he describes as ‘a work of art’.
He added: “I know that we can’t live in the past but I think that bottle ovens are an amazing and enduring legacy from those times. I’ve found that they can spark memories, conversations and ideas among people wherever I go.
“I also realise that even though lots of us love them today, it would have been a different story and very hard for the people who worked inside them. I think that bottle ovens do something similar now that they perhaps did in their heyday too, which is that they give people a sense of stability in an ever-changing world.
“One of my favourite quotes is from a lady on my Facebook page who said that ‘if you can see bottle ovens, you know that you’re among friends.’ They’re a part of our identity and I think it’s very important that we do all we can to keep them standing.”
Each kiln is made to order, with a 12-week waiting list due to high demand. Daily Focus readers can get 10 per cent off when buying two or more until 31 August using the code DAILYFOCUS10 at www.tatterstack.co.uk/shop.
