We had a few days in Ironbridge recently, visiting all the places we didn’t get around to last time. Including places we didn’t realise existed (like the street named Paradise – we visited Hell in Norway some years ago, so this was the logical destination).
This time, we headed for the Jackfield Tile Museum and the Coalport China Museum on our first day. Having seen tiles being made on The Great Pottery Throwdown, we were keen to see whether this was how they were made here – but of course, this was a factory. No careful individual rolling out. The range of designs was amazing, and there’s an entire lifetime collection donated by someone who bought a single tile in 1968 and got hooked on collecting more.
It’s easy to miss the fact that the Victorians started the push for better hygeine, public lavatories everywhere to keep the common folk from piddling in the gutters and of course, tiled walls and floors are easier to keep clean than wood or stone. The tile industry took off. Jackfield supplied tiles for the stations being built on the London Underground. We looked everywhere for the tiles we uncovered on our kitchen floor without finding anything like them, but I suspect they are late Victorian or early 20th century. Maybe on a future visit I can take a photo of the tiles to Jackfield and ask them.
Between Jackfield and Coalport is an old tile factory that used to be run by the Maws family. These days, it hosts a gathering of artists and craftspeople. It’s worth a visit – in many of the places, artists sit working on their pieces and they are happy to chat to visitors about the techniques they use. I dropped in on a man making jewellery out of coins (legally) and then we were invited in to a model making studio. Beautiful, accurate, detailed models.
I had to include this photo of the door of the Boat Inn at Coalport. The Severn was boiling along quietly about twenty feet below the doorstep level at this point, and it was hard to believe that it reached this height even once – but clearly, this is an annual event. Only 2017 and 2018 breaks the run of at least one high flood a year since 2008.
Over the bridge to the Coalport side, and a canal full of ducks. And drakes. And several fluffy ducklings zooming around like a group of wind-up toys. A drake made a dive into one of the floating duck islands while we were there, and a duck came flying out, followed shortly afterwards by six ducklings.
Coalport China Museum. They have photos there of the staff in 1951, some of whom were in their seventies and still working. The old equipment and moulds are still preserved, and there are staff working there who are happy to chat to visitors about the history of the factory – a special thank-you to Janice, who took a great deal of time at the end of a long day to talk to us. They suffer just as badly when the Severn floods, and they have photos of the factory during lockdown with river up to the fourth course of bricks. They get warnings, and they can move artefacts up to a higher level, but the scrubbing job afterwards is probably beyond belief.
Back to the accommodation via the chip shop. Yes, not healthy, but it was that halfway time of night when every cafe had shut its doors and none of the restaurants were serving. By the time we got back to our own room we had walked somewhere between eight and ten miles and were not too inclined to walk back down the hill and then back up with a full meal on board. Not just not inclined – barely capable of walking.
Day Two, and we were headed for Blists Hill. All the way back out to Coalport, up the hill to the Shakespeare Inn and then more up – up until we were sure we’d missed a sign somewhere and were headed for the outskirts of Telford. Just as we were about to reach the top of the ridge, we got to the entrance of Blists Hill Town.
Blists Hill is a town frozen in 1900, the last full year of Victoria’s reign. Many of the shops and cottages have been rebuilt there from buildings demolished elsewhere, or preserved where they stood. The contents of the chemist’s shop above came from a Bristol chemist that closed down with so many ancient boxes and tins and dusty old artefacts in its store-room that it was a museum in itself. There was a dentist’s chair in a side room, ready to have a patient strapped in and teeth pulled out. Reminded me of the people who pulled out their own teeth during lockdown. Have we really got so far back to Victorian times?
The haberdasher’s shop dresses their window in mourning every January as a tribute to Queen Victoria and a stalwart early volunteer, both of whom died in January (different years). They sell embroidered and tartan hankies, ribbon and fabric. Just up the road, the sweet shop sells traditional sweets from jars in ounces. Sad to say, something we both remember from our childhoods. If we’d wanted to be authentic we would have changed up our modern money for Victorian coins – all the shops take both currencies and card as well – but the bank was full (and I worked in a bank with Victorian values, and thank you, I don’t want to go back). The shops all function as shops, by the way. You can buy cloth in the haberdashery, bread and cake in the bakers, scent from the chemist and beef-fat chips from the chip-shop. We arrived at the stables just in time to see the Shire horses being harnessed for their outing – a film crew were busy at the warehouse, filming an episode of ‘Belgravia’, and I assume there’ll be two solid Shires plodding past in the background.
Our feet were begging to go home by this point, and we agreed. It was another four miles home. It went faster this time, probably because we were walking downhill and because we recognised waypoints. We didn’t realise it at the time, but the orchard we walked past was the Coalport Community Orchard, and we could have gone in and wandered among the blossom.
It was an ambition this time, to wander around the Woodside Community Orchard while it was in blossom and compare it to our own local orchard, but every time I put it off. My legs and feet hurt every evening, and they hurt so much on the morning we left that I was just grateful to be able to lower myself into the driver’s seat. No chance I could have walked uphill for half a mile and enjoyed the view. We got home and enjoyed the chance to put our aching feet up.
Still. A great couple of days away. Next?