You have either spent an awful lot of time thinking about, lusting after and searching for terracotta pots, or you’ve barely given them a second thought. It is an affliction of the horticulturally minded, a purist’s pursuit that often leads to disappointment or, worse, the DIY shop. Those with the bug know that wheel-thrown is best; despite being elusive and expensive, such containers are always worth it. Aficionados rejoice, then, in the wonders of Hoxton Gardenware, a non-profit social enterprise that trains young Londoners in the production of distinctive, small-batch terracotta pots thrown by hand.
While the mission of the programme is forward-thinking, the garden pots are rooted in tradition. The fertile soil of Hoxton in the East End was once a rural network of market gardens and specialist nurseries dating back to the 17th century. The frontispiece of Thomas Fairchild’s book The City Gardener (1722) shows his Hoxton garden with orderly beds, brick greenhouses, a gallivanting spaniel and large pots, one of which contains an exotic agave. The bucolic vision of a verdant Hoxton has now all but disappeared beneath bricks and mortar – save for a hidden corner yard in the shadow of Fairchild’s nursery, a place where creativity and horticulture still flourish.
On entering, you’re greeted by a mature agave undulating from a brick planter, a nod to Fairchild’s specimen and the neighbourhood’s roots. Two small steel-framed greenhouses are filled with workaday evidence of potting and planting, and terracotta flowerpots and stone troughs spill over with sempervivums and alpines outside. Though not a manicured display, it immediately expresses the fact that some creative and potentially messy pursuit is afoot. Outdoor shelves are laden with fresh, unsullied terracotta pots, earthy and full of promise of the plants to come. Next to the bottle-green doors of the whitewashed workshop are piles of red clay, dripping and pooling. Some is stacked in bags; some sits in overflowing bins. Through the doors into the pottery studio, the artist Aaron Angell is often found tending a small wood-fired stove, saving its ashes to use for the ceramic glazes to come. The atmosphere is transporting, the surfaces spattered and bohemian, pots lined up to the rafters, rows of handmade tools and books thumbed with clay fingerprints: a hub of activity for the artists and neighbours the studio serves. It feels as if the relentlessness of London has melted away at the door, while the city’s energy and spirit remain flickering inside.
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Hoxton Gardenware is an offshoot of Troy Town, the sculpture-specific ceramic studio founded by Angell that hosts creative residences such as the upcoming collaboration with Pop artist Colin Self. The studio also offers ceramics classes and retails a line of sophisticated chawan teaware to fund the studio’s endeavours, also drawing on sources of both public and private support. In 2018, Troy Town conceived Hoxton Gardenware in partnership with the charity Create, an arts and architecture charity, as a local outreach initiative to give young people (18–24) in the vicinity paid employment and training in the craft of wheel-thrown ceramics, as well as tangible, transferable skills in sales and communication. Trainees are taught from the ground up, and after a hiatus brought about by the pandemic, wheels have begun to turn again, with a new group throwing fresh garden pots this summer. Apparently half of these participants had felt so at home behind the wheel they went on to continue their study of ceramics on leaving Troy Town. The nature of the programme has transformation at its core, both of people and of the material itself in the alchemy of the kiln.
The trainees produce two distinct variations of gardenware for exterior and interior planting: a classic unglazed red clay beloved by the green-fingered since the earliest of gardens and a glossed-up houseplant version in a looping lead glaze that harks back to 17th-century British ceramics. The red terracotta’s charms belie its straightforward utility, for it’s a rare and special thing to find contemporary hand-thrown garden pots that don’t bend to the contemporary penchant for embossed frippery or saccharine farmhouse detailing. These are the vessels of a working potting shed, stacked up in pleasing rows, waiting for cuttings of scented pelargoniums to fulfil their destiny under sun and rain. The forms are reassuringly simple, with broad horizontal turning lines and a made-by-hand wobble, complete with the gently flared rims that seem to have been the perennial feature of all flowerpots since time immemorial. Some feature ribbing, and others, gently rolled stamping to create a textural nuance.
The scale of the pots is city-sized, more for the balcony than the grand parterre, but this suits their London born-and-bred nature, like so many red clay chimney stacks in a row. The interior slip-glazed pots stand in glossy contrast to their raw brethren, but the muted tones and sketch-like graphic scribbles chime with Hoxton’s grit, and the pots wouldn’t look out of place in a fourth-floor flat with a silver begonia or nestled among the Staffordshire slipware display in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Troy Town makes many of its own tools for production, and especially charming are the glaze drippers for this slipware, from old tin cans welded with many spiky spouts, to bike-tyre inner tubes used for spraying slip.
While their tools may be unique, there is no improving on the classic shapes of gardenware, says Angell; innovation inform tends to negate a pot’s primary function. Rather than looking forward for its ideas, the gardenware line draws from the past, finding inspiration in anything from ancient Roman courtyards to classic Victorian pots produced by the thousands for the horticultural trade in Britain. Especially covetable is Hoxton Gardenware’s terracotta pot with drainage holes along the exterior bottom edge, based on a popular 19th-century pot designed for plants needing free-draining soil. It was once a staple before the plastic container took over, and it is ripe for a return.
Potters were one of history’s first manufacturers, taking a raw resource and turning it into something entirely different, something with the utility and durability to outlast civilisations. For Angell, it’s vital to keep the tradition of small-scale production alive in London, which once was the body and soul of the city’s industry. The studio operates the only publicly accessible gas-fired kiln in London, and it is this piece of technology that lies at the heart of the operation. When the kiln is ablaze, Troy Town carries the torch, and one cannot help but admire what comes out of its fires.
For more information, visit hoxtongardenware.co.uk
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