Hey Guys,
The Explore
This was the first site my housemate and I visited on our ‘potteries road-trip’ and was by far the largest and newest of all the pottery works we visited. The building is a brutalist pebble-dashed concrete monolith, with relatively few windows along its imposing elevations. The scale of production on the site overshadows all the smaller works for which the area is famous and provides a massive contrast with the ‘rustic’ bottle kilns dotted around Longton. Shire’s kilns were situated in the basement of the building, whilst the upper floors were dedicated to various stages of the process.
Despite many of the machines being removed, the explore was still very interesting with rows of sanitary ware mid-production on the upper floors.
History
In 2005 the factory shed over 200 jobs with the factory finally closing in 2006 with production being out-sourced to Eastern Europe. Shires Bathrooms was part of the larger Irish based firm Qualceram Shires, which went into administration in 2009 following a drop in the retail and construction market.
Regards
The Explore
This was the first site my housemate and I visited on our ‘potteries road-trip’ and was by far the largest and newest of all the pottery works we visited. The building is a brutalist pebble-dashed concrete monolith, with relatively few windows along its imposing elevations. The scale of production on the site overshadows all the smaller works for which the area is famous and provides a massive contrast with the ‘rustic’ bottle kilns dotted around Longton. Shire’s kilns were situated in the basement of the building, whilst the upper floors were dedicated to various stages of the process.
Despite many of the machines being removed, the explore was still very interesting with rows of sanitary ware mid-production on the upper floors.
History
In 2005 the factory shed over 200 jobs with the factory finally closing in 2006 with production being out-sourced to Eastern Europe. Shires Bathrooms was part of the larger Irish based firm Qualceram Shires, which went into administration in 2009 following a drop in the retail and construction market.
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Regards
