When a design is complete in the jig, you lay a glued sheet of paper on top of the tiles, place a board over it, and flip the tray and board upside-down, holding very tight. If you don’t hold tight enough, the tiles move around, and the mathematical precision is lost. The best boards to use are small sheets of hardboard, rough side up, fractionally bigger than the standard square foot of the setting tray. The rough side is less prone to problems created by any accidental spillage of glue than the shiny side. When I bought Milano’s jigs, the boards came too, as a free gift.

They were the cause of regular embarrassment. At some stage, a Milano employee had undergone a psychotic breakdown, and the boards were scrawled with obscene and insane graffiti of a type I cannot relate here. But if they were shocking, they were freighted with history. I could have bought or made new boards, but I treasured these objects. They were invaluable and put to multiple uses in the workshop. How helpful it was to find just the right sized board to shift a wet mosaic, made by a charming student from the Home Counties, on paper, according to the reverse method. How I perfected, like a magician, the act of laughingly spiriting away the board from a surprised individual, in a valiant effort to convince her she hadn’t just read what she thought she had.

The jigs themselves were stamped with the name of the company that sold them. UDNY, they said. What Milano was to North London, Edgar Udny was to South London. If you were determined enough you could find them under a railway arch in Vauxhall. In the entrance to the arch, squinting into the sun from the troglodytic gloom, sat one, or sometimes two of the employees, jigging up a random mix. Yes, those were the days of the old technology.

(For non-mosaicist readers, a ‘random mix’ is a selection of tiles, placed with a balanced rhythm of colours in a non repetitive way. Confusingly, given the name, they generally cannot be made according to pure chance.)

An antique Udny setting tray, with a off-set, rather than a gridded structure.

I don’t know what impression I made on the workforce at Milano Mosaics. But they certainly made an impression on me. I remember almost everything they ever told me. I revered them. I lapped up the stories about working with Boris Anrep (Russian artist and mosaicist, and creator of the entrance floors to the National Gallery) and jigging up vitreous mixes for various hotels and subways across London. I was entertained by tales of going to Venice with artist Howard Hodgkin to specify tiles for his swimming pool mural at the Broadgate Leisure Club – and was delighted to buy the left-over supplies. I loved the pride both in high and commercial culture – thank god no one was working the marketing spin at Milano Mosaics. The showroom was hung with dog-eared and slightly out of focus photos of tile-clad walls adjacent to car parks and concrete fencing. What a relief it was to exit promo-land and enter the world of making and manufacturing.

‘Saivo mosaics – lovely colours – have you got any of these?’ I enquired.

‘Oh no, darlin’ – we ‘ad tons of it, but we used it as ballast under the car park.’ This was a typical exchange at Milano Mosaics.

In the old days mosaic was supplied loose in wooden barrels, and they still had those in the warehouse. Then there were sacks – plenty of them – and finally boxes. These days mosaic is supplied in health and safety sized two square metre cardboard cartons, but these boxes were at least twice the size – huge and heavy. Glass mosaic was thicker then, and came sheeted up with a tighter joint. Wider joints, thinner tiles – less material, more profit. When the manufacturers made the changes, I felt ripped off, but these days I suppose we would all be pleased we were using up less of the world’s resources.

Talking of the world’s resources, I heard an interesting fact yesterday. Ten years ago, they had no high-speed rail in China. This year they have more high-speed rail track than all of Europe, and next year they will have more high-speed rail than all of Europe and the rest of the world. Global growth — it’s alarming. It almost makes me glad the tiles are getting thinner.

Whizzy manufacturing.

This photograph has been released into the public domain by its author, Alex Needham at the wikipedia project.

I did enjoy the occasional trip into this unfamiliar world though. Milano’s showroom was a portacabin. The warehouse was a big shed topped by a kidney shaped harlequin mosaic made by ‘Old Man Zanelli’. I never knew Signor Zanelli, but he was a figure of legend, referred to reverentially by the staff.  The company ‘Zanelli’, by this stage, seemed to be the same thing as ‘Milano’, but at one time I think they were two enterprises. There were different numbers in the Yellow Pages, but when you rang, you were greeted by the same gruff tones on both lines.

Milano was run by Otello Cavallo — and an English guy. I can’t remember what the English guy was called. He was nice, and very helpful, but the name Otello Cavallo is somehow more memorable.

Eventually, when Milano closed down, I paid a token sum for the kidney shaped harlequin mosaic and brought it to the workshop. I couldn’t allow it to be thrown away. It was part of a legacy, part of the history of British mosaic. I wanted a place in that history too.  It wasn’t that I liked the harlequin especially, but the object was symbolically important. The staff at Milano liked it very much.

‘Old Man Zanelli thought he might sell it to the Harlequin Centre in Watford’ they told me admiringly ‘but he never did.’ At the time I identified strongly with these mild but thwarted aspirations, and of course I still do.

I confess I understood the reluctance of The Harlequin Centre in Watford — Palace of Thatcherite Consumer Culture, to purchase Mr Zanelli’s running Harlequin, with his brightly-coloured diamond-patterned catsuit, and curious short truncheon. He cut a slightly sinister figure, an impression only enhanced by the anachronistic kidney shaped board on which he was mounted. He was not a slick, shiny symbol of contemporary consumerism. He was a richer, odder, creature from another era.

Historically, Venetian masks, like his Batman’s Robin-style one, were worn to protect the wearer’s identity during decadent pursuits, or transgressive behaviour of questionable morality traversing class boundaries. Furthermore there is a tradition of ‘Hellequin’ – found in French passion plays, in which the harlequin is an emissary of the devil, chasing the damned back to hell.  These were the worlds of Signor Zanelli’s harlequin.

A more appropriate icon for the Palace of Shopping in Watford was the jester in a clown-suit and a buffoon’s belled hat – a symbol that we’d all become fools and children now.

Grown up art at the Harlequin Shopping Centre, Watford.

Photo: Nigel Cox. Permission: Creative Commons Licence 2.0

Stoke, now among the poorest cities in the UK, was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. Naturally rich in coal, water and clay, it was until recently a centre of the coal, steel and pottery industries. Michelin is also based here. All these industries have been savaged over the past twenty years, leaving the city decimated. The Tories attack on the coal industry in the eighties, the effect of their policies on the steel industry, and the pressure on the ceramic industry to shift production to the Far East has had catastrophic effects on employment. Michelin employed 9000 people in the eighties. The figure today is 1000.

During the making of Made in England, I had meetings with both the Secretary and the Assistant General Secretary of the Ceramic and Allied Trades Union (formerly CATU, now renamed UNITY – an acronym that no longer refers to ceramic – a sad but realistic reflection of the vastly reduced significance of the ceramic industry to the union’s membership). Gary Oakes, the AGS, talked about the role of UNITY in supporting members’ changing employment. They had recently helped one set up a business doing nails and hair extensions, and aided another to find employment as an embalmer, he told me.

The public knows about what happened to the miners and the steel workers — they had powerful Union representation. But workers in the ceramic industry were particularly vulnerable. Potteries tended to be family businesses, small, and not unionised. The city of Stoke-on-Trent itself is a fairly recent invention. Stoke is a federation of six towns – Stoke, Hanley, Fenton, Longton, Tunstall and Burslem, each formerly with its own town hall, and local infrastructure. This accounts for much of the city’s character – on the one hand these were genuine local communities, each with a particularity of place, but they were also parochial and not very outward looking.

These observations are relevant to Made in England. I went to Stoke, not really knowing the city. I had to find out what it was. I knew the names of the towns – they were familiar from the backstamps, but what about local people?  I wanted to involve the community in the project. As I drove in to snowy outskirts of the city, I wondered how I would do that.

Not all the young lark about in quite that way. I had some lovely students today, including one young man who is a total beginner. He clutched a plastic bag of pottery sherds and fragments of iridescent glass. Both were still wet, having been collected the previous day from the banks of the Thames.

For centuries, the Thames has been London’s sewer. The banks are shored up with old industrial waste, some of which came from the ‘shawdruck’ (the pottery tip, full of unwanted, broken and faulty ware). I told Ondrej (who is from the Czech Republic) that he was a ‘mudlark’.

In 2010 to be a mudlark is to be a treasure-hunter, but in the nineteenth century it was far from a leisure activity. It was a job, done by society’s desperate and pitiful. Most were children, but some were widows – impoverished women with no means of support – who collected coal from the river-shore and any kind of material they could sell on to other poverty-stricken individuals. In so doing, they took their lives in their hands. The Thames was insanitary. London’s sewers ran straight into it. Nor was it unusual for these wretched individuals to have to pick their way between corpses – both human and animal.

I am embarking on a project ‘Made in England Unearthed.’ Once again, it based on the history of the ceramic industry. It uses both Thames collected ware, and fragments of ceramic found in London gardens. I would be delighted if anyone has anything they would like to contribute to the project. The artist John McLean, who together with his wife Jan, has been an inveterate mudlark, offered me his collection this week, when he phoned to tell us of the sad demise of the artist Ken Noland. Both Matt and John knew Ken, and are very sorry he is no more.

Fragments of ceramic slipware and transfer printed table ware collected by my student Ondrej.

Gave a long illustrated lecture about principles of design. The students were smiling and nodding in agreement at the points I was making. On the edge of launching into an explanation of allegory in depictions of animals in the medieval world and their form of pictorial expression, I noticed some of my audience had fallen asleep.

Allegory is interesting though. We think of the Middle Ages as entirely separate from the classical world, but they didn’t think like that then. They had to reinterpret the past, and re-understand earlier beliefs from a new Christian perspective. Everything had its place in a cosmic order. So representations of animals – the kind you see in the mosaics at Aquileia, Ganagobie or (to my mind best of all) at Otranto, are not just illustrative, they are full of meaning. Each creature stands for an aspect of the Christian message. A peacock, for example (which had been known in the classical world as a symbol of the afterlife) is given new symbolic meaning by standing for the incorruptible flesh of Christ, and of life eternal. Images of animals were not sentimental, they were potent reminders of the moral order of the world.

Image of Otranto by Adrian Fletcher. I highly recommend you click this link. He has wonderful photographs, and recommendations about where to eat if you visit.

Photo © Adrian Fletcher, www.paradoxplace.com

The plan was to have a series of exhibitions in Darmstadt. Olbrich was to design the main exhibition hall. He also designed a studio complex, where the artists could work, adjoining underground apartments where some of them could live. Underground is odd isn’t it?

The artists were able buy property at a favourable rate. The idea was to build imaginative houses and go on to exhibit them. Each house was to be a living example of how to combine art, craft and design in a domestic setting. Mosaic was a feature of the scheme. Sadly, the artists found it a bit tricky to afford the houses, but eight of them were finished in time for the exhibition in 1901. The scheme lost a lot of money. Most of the artists left, but Olbrich stuck it out.

In 1904 they tried again. This time the houses were only temporary constructions. There wasn’t the money to do anything else.

In the third exhibition in 1908 they decided the colony should have housing for the poor as well as the rich. This new area was known as ‘the small residence colony’. Local industrialists paid for homes, none of which was to cost more than 4000 marks for a single person or 7200 marks for two. Sadly, the scheme didn’t take off, and when the show was over the houses were demolished.

The steam went out of the plans for the colony. Quite a bit of it was destroyed in World War Two; a few houses were restored according to the original plans, others were transformed. In the 1960s some artists tried again. Today, although some of the buildings are not what they were, many of them remain architecturally interesting.

Olbrich was an imaginative designer, and the mosaics he had made for the colony — named Mathildenhoehe — are very fine. The cupola of the Exhibition Hall by Olbrich is an art nouveau masterpiece, but there are also interesting mosaics in the Wedding Tower, by Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens. They commemorate the wedding of the Grand Duke to his bride Princess Eleanore zu Solms-Hohensolms-Lich. What fun it must be to be rich.

Olbrich’s mosaic for the Exhibition Hall

The artist’s studios, by Olbrich. Shouldn’t we all have ones like this?

Version 1: Constance Kent waits until the family and the servants are asleep. By dead of night she lifts her sleeping brother from his bed, takes him to a privy and cuts his throat – so brutally that he is virtually decapitated.

Version 2: Constance’s father is having an affair with his son’s nursemaid. Their love making interrupted by the child, he slits the boy’s throat in a fit of jealous rage and takes him to the outhouse.

Version 3: Jealous and enraged by their father’s second marriage, Constance’s brother murders his step brother and dumps the body in the outhouse. Constance is complicit, or alternatively, Constance is entirely free from involvement.

Five years after the murder, Constance confesses her guilt to an Anglican clergyman. She is tried, pleads guilty and is imprisoned. Many people doubt the validity of her confession, amongst them Charles Dickens, who feels she is shielding her father, or perhaps her brother. Dickens uses Constance as a model for Helena Landless in his unfinished novel ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’.

There is an English folk song about the case. These are some of the lines. Perhaps they scan better when set to music:

His little throat I cut from ear to ear

Wrapped him in a blanket and away did steer

To the water-closet, which soon I found,

In the dirty soil then I pushed him down.

Constance is sentenced to death, but her sentence is commuted, owing to her youth and her confession. She is incarcerated in a number of places, and it is in prison that she is trained in the art of mosaic making. She makes mosaic pavements – sometimes known as ‘Opus Criminale’. One is for the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, another is for St Peter’s, The Grove on the Isle of Portland.  After 20 years in jail, she goes on to spend 50 years in Australia, dying at the age of 100.

Constance Kent

Pavement design for the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral

All this is true of Mikhail Lomonsov, and his impressiveness doesn’t stop there. Born in the eighteenth century, he was the man who brought coloured glass to Russia. He was a poet, a scientist, and he established the rules of the literary Russian language. Plus he discovered that Venus had an atmosphere.

While he was spending time in prison – a consequence of his bad temper — he didn’t laze about.  He wrote  ‘276 Notes on Corpuscular Philosophy and Physics’ which summed up most of his big scientific ideas. A humanitarian, he wanted changes to the system of serfdom — although what he wrote on that subject was censored. Towards the end of his life, he was persecuted. Once dead, the state rehabilitated him and suppressed anything he wrote they didn’t like.

In his laboratory, he made glass, and set up a coloured glass works. Forty of his mosaics are known, of which twenty survive. Here are some details of one of them. This is a model of a mosaicist to which we can only aspire.

The building has a fascinating history. Like many other churches, it was closed down following the Revolution. In 1931 it opened briefly as a Museum of the People’s Will, celebrating the event leading to its foundation. It was closed again three years later, reportedly on the orders of Stalin, who was beginning to doubt the wisdom of  commemorating acts of terror, fearing an attack on himself. The church might have been demolished, but warehouse space in the city was in scarce supply, and it was reprieved on this basis. Used to house unburied corpses during the 900 terrible days of the Siege of Leningrad,  after the war it became a vegetable store, and won the nickname ‘Our Saviour on Potatoes’. It gained a preservation order in 1969 and has now been restored and opened as a mosaic museum.

The mosaics were made by the Frolov Workshops — famous exponents of the ‘indirect method’. Fittingly, they are both magnificent and frightful.