Potteries
in Ipswich
"The Potteries' area
"The Potteries' is a name given to the area west of today's Alexandra
Park; the park shown on the right of the map below was once the
parkland owned by the
Byles family who lived at Hill House (its position marked by Hill House
Road off Back Hamlet). The area known for many decades
as 'The Potteries' – roughly the site of Suffolk New College, with the
'cliff' (scarp) up to Alexandra Park (today's Brickmakers Wood project
as shown on our brickyard page, see
also our Links page)
caused by clay-digging was
probably the source of raw material for the seventh and eighth century
slow wheel-thrown pottery which was widely distributed in Britain and
the
Rhineland and which is called by archaeologists 'Ipswich Ware'
because of its characteristic composition ('inclusions' in the clay
body) and glaze. A stratum of white
clay was estimated by historian John Glyde (1823-1905) in 1850 to be
thirty feet
deep in the area of The Potteries and there was, of course, plentiful
local, fresh spring water. The greatest
number of kilns was
found just inside the late Saxon rampart and ditch which ran down what
is now Upper Orwell Street; 'St Helen's pottery ground' succeeded
these kilns in later centuries. The decline of this ancient trade is
the
story told in Frank Grace's book Rags
& bones (see Reading list). See
our page on Ipswich brickyards for
more information on brick and tile making.
Here is a
1902 map of much of the Potteries area, from Cox Lane in the west to
Alexandra Park in the east. Our Courts and
yards page describes some of the terrible housing conditions of
this tightly-packed vicinity.
1902 map
Archaeological significance
It is a sobering thought that the long story of Ipswich was neither
known, nor acknowledged, until the 1950s, when some of the pottery
stored in the Ipswich Museum was studied by John
Hurst and Stanley West. The pottery had been
discovered on the south side at the eastern end of Carr Street. The
pottery was dated from the mid-seventh to the mid-ninth century and was
named 'Ipswich Ware' The first professional and government-funded
archaeological excavations
were carried out by Stanley West at Cox Lane in 1958 and Shire Hall Yard in 1959. West established
that Ipswich was a large settlement, covering at least 30 hectares, and
international port during the Middle Saxon period (c.700-870
AD). As well as locally made
ware, there wwere imported Rhenish amphorae (largea two-handled pot
with a neck that is considerably narrower than the body for
wine/oil/grain storage) which indicated trade in the early eighth or
early ninth century. By way of confirmation, a wine barrel discovered
in Lower Brook Street was dated by dendrochronology to around 871
AD and matched a tree-ring pattern of the Mainz area. In the
early 1970s it
became clear that Ipswich was one of only a handful of trading
settlements, displaying urban characteristics (emporia), in
North-Western Europe during this period. This elevated the town’s
archaeological status to one of international importance.
You would not know it from today's aspect, but Cox Lane is probably one
of the town's oldest routes, with nothing to mark the 400-year-plus
pottery-making era. Nearby roads – south of Rope Walk –
named Pottery Street and Potter Street (see the map details above and
on our County Hall page under 'County
& Borough Gaols') signify the
importance of the industry. The other major Ipswich
Ware
archaeological dig occurred before the buiding of the Buttermarket
Shopping Centre (opened in 1992).
The Middle Saxon economy was based on craft production and
international trade. Craft production was dominated by the Ipswich Ware
pottery industry. It was a large scale enterprise, concentrated in the
north east corner of the town along Carr Street, but outlying kilns
have also been excavated at the Buttermarket site and south of the
river in Stoke. The importance of the Ipswich Ware industry is shown by
its distribution, which not only covers the entire Anglo-Saxon Kingdom
of East Anglia but as far as the West Country, Yorkshire, London and
Kent. Most sites across the town also produce evidence of bone and
antler working, spinning and weaving, and metalworking. Leatherworking
too must have been common but evidence for it only survived in the
waterlogged deposits of the waterfront.
Ipswich Ware
The later years of the seventh century saw a considerable change in
the nature of English settlement. Burgeoning trade with mainland
Europe corresponded with the rise of the wics,
proto-urban marketplaces with access by major river to the sea. By the
early eighth century, such places were flourishing, with Ipswich
(Gippeswic), London (Lundenwic) and Southampton (Hamwic) being the most
important in southern England.
For the previous two centuries, the majority of English domestic
pottery had comprised simple, hand-formed and bonfire-fired jars, most
of which were manufactured at a domestic level, with little evidence
that full-time, professional potting took place. The wares showed
little significant change in either form or fabric throughout the
period.
During the eighth century, in the wics
of Southampton and London, such traditional wares continued to be made
and used as the everyday domestic pottery. In Ipswich, similar
locally-produced handmade pottery was in use during the late 7th
century, but there was then a change in pottery production at the
Suffolk wic which, in
archaeological terms, can be described as both sudden and dramatic. The
new material, which has become known as Ipswich Ware, was manufactured
exclusively in the Ipswich, and unlike
all other contemporary native pottery types, was finished on a
turn-table, and fired in kilns, one of which was excavated in the
Buttermarket area of Ipswich in 1989.
With the advent of Ipswich Ware, the simple hand-made forms in use in
the wic quickly disappear
from the archaeological record, and within a few decades the ware was
the only pottery in use on sites anywhere in East Anglia. It was a
plain, sandy greyware which was made in two main fabrics - smooth and
gritty. Vessels were generally small, medium and large baggy jars with
plain upright rims. Hanging vessels with upright pierced lugs were also
made, and there were some rarer forms such as decorated bottles. Jar
bases are characteristically very thick, and upper bodies are often
'girth-grooved. 'It was not
only the manufacturing technology which was more advanced. Rather than
being almost exclusively jar forms, around 10% of the production
comprised spouted pitchers, the only English-made examples of the
period. The only other pottery pitchers available at that time were
imports from the continent, and relatively few of these travelled
beyond their ports of entry. Ipswich Ware also had a far greater
distribution than any other contemporary English pottery type.
Whilst most contemporary pottery was used within a fairly limited area,
Ipswich Ware is found throughout eastern England from York to Kent, and
as far west as Oxfordshire. Analysis of the Ipswich Ware assemblages
found at sites outside East
Anglia has shown that a far higher proportion of large jars and
pitchers occur, suggesting that the ware was moving as containers for
traded goods in the case of the former and as pottery in its own right
in the case of the latter. Very large quantities of Ipswich Ware
have been found at sites in London in recent years, but only a single
sherd is so far known from Southampton. French and Rhenish imported
wares were also arriving in quantity in London and Southampton, with as
much as 10% of the Southampton assemblage comprising continental
pottery. Such wares occur in Ipswich although in somewhat smaller
quantities. Like Ipswich Ware, these vessels were technologically more
sophisticated than the products of other English traditions, being
kiln-fired. However, unlike Ipswich Ware, they were thrown on a true
fast wheel, but despite these possible influences, the handmade pottery
of London and Southampton continued in use throughout the Middle Saxon
period (c.700-870 AD),
with little, if any, attempt by the indigenous potters to
imitate the form or function of the 'superior' imported wares.
The overall picture is more than a little curious. Despite apparently
more sophisticated pottery being available, the people of London and
Southampton continued to use their traditional relatively crude
wares, whereas the people of Ipswich changed to a superior technology,
yet one that is still at a lesser level than that of the continental
potters.
The origins of Ipswich Ware have been considered on several occasions,
and most authorities postulate that the material was not made by
immigrant potters on the grounds that it is neither wheel-thrown nor
rouletted, techniques which were used by both Rhenish and Frankish
potters of the period, whose wares, as noted earlier, made up the bulk
of the material imported into the English wics.
During the Late Saxon period (880-920 AD) the Thetford Ware pottery industry
replaced the Ipswich Ware industry. The latter remained in the
north-east area of the Ipswich, along Carr Street and one kiln was
excavated in St Helens Street. A
further kiln was found in Turret Lane,
south of the Buttermarket site. Thetford-type ware is so-called because
kilns for the manufacture of this Late Saxon wheelmade pottery were
first uncovered in Thetford. However, it is likely that the ware
developed in Ipswich. It is a medium sandy greyware, although fine and
coarse fabrics are also known.
[Information based on Paul Blinkhorn's paper presented to the 'Pottery
in the Making' Conference at the British Museum, 1997: Stranger
in a strange land: Middle
Saxon Ipswich ware; also notes by Keith Wade, former head of
the Suffolk Archaeological Unit. Additional details from Twinch, C. Ipswich street by street, see Reading list.]
Related pages:
County Hall for information and
maps relating to the County and Borough Gaols;
Ropewalks and the rope-making industry in
the east of the town;
Brickyards for brick and tile-making in
this area of the town and elsewhere;
House
name plaque examples: Alston Road;
Bramford Road;
Cauldwell Hall Road; Cavendish Street; Marlborough Road; Rosehill area;
Ipswich & Suffolk Freehold Land
Society (F.L.S.); California;
Street index; Origins of street names
in Ipswich; Streets named after slavery
abolitionists.
Dated buildings list; Dated buildings examples;
Named
buildings list;
Named (& sometimes dated) buildings
examples.
Street nameplate examples
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