Looking for Spode
3 February 2009
When I was a student, I spent very many happy hours exploring the industrial back streets of the city of Birmingham where I grew up and went to school - I have many photos of boarded up factories, peeling doors, redbrick facades that had seen better days. The industrial decline of my home city became the subject of the first images I created in ceramic surfaces... I was tonight taken back to those Brum wanderings, and to my photo archives of industrial decline, by a web site I found - I’m writing in my Phd thesis and was just trying to find out about the current state if the Spode Factory in Stoke on Trent, where I spent some time a few years ago researching the copper plate archives. It closed in 2007 and shipped production overseas (just like Rörstrand, Royal Copenhagen and many of the other European ceramic manufacturers).. then went bust a few months ago. I was trying to find out if the business was still ticking over and what had happened to the factory site.. and in my googling I came across this site - a pretty amazing forum with priceless images of abandoned industrial sites: <a href="http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=6&order=desc&page=2">28DL</a>. In particular of course I was so pleased to find images of the Spode Factory by ‘Dweeb’ and the the pics below are courtesy of him and from this web page: <a href="http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=20568">http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=20568</a>. All are from Spode.....