This new museum tells the story of Liverpool with diverse exhibits housed in a stunning building.
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This new museum tells the story of Liverpool with diverse exhibits housed in a stunning building.
Archaeology
On 12 November 1756 the first advert for Porcelain produced in Liverpool appeared in the Liverpool Advertiser. It read:
'Liverpool China Manufactory of Messrs Reid and Co, proprietors of the China Manufactory, have opened their warehouse in Castle Street and sell all kinds of blue and white china ware, not inferior to any made in England, both wholesale and retail'.
This made Reid's the first porcelain maker in Liverpool.
The company lasted little more than five years and was bankrupt by June 1761. The business continued under William Ball, before it was sold in July 1763 to Thomas Lewis, a Liverpool Baker, and leased to James Pennington and Co. Pennington continued to produce porcelain on the site until around 1768 when he moved his factory to Park Lane.
Until 1997 none of the Liverpool porcelain factories had been archaeologically investigated, although finds have been recovered from trenches in William Brown Street and elsewhere. However plans to build a new school on the site of Reid's factory on Brownlow Hill allowed for trial excavations in the forecourt of the garage then occupying the site. This led to further larger scale excavations during 1998 over the remaining area of the proposed school development.
Map of Brownlow Hill made by John Eyes in 1765 (in
the Liverpool Record Office, Reference Hf 912.1765
A sequence of maps enables the location of the factory to be established and the development of the site to be charted. Its first appeared in 1765 on the John Eyes map. This shows the 'China Works' on a rectangular plot of land on Brownlow Hill surrounded by fields. By 1803 the plot is vacant. During the 19th century the site was redeveloped several times. By 1970 the site was occupied by a garage with forecourts on Brownlow Hill. The garage buildings remained on the site until demolition prior to the construction of the new school buildings during 1998-9.
The 1765 map shows the pottery works as a building, surrounding a courtyard entered by a passage to the street, and a mill for grinding colours in the opposite corner. The site was built in a relatively rural setting lying to the east of the urban outskirts of Liverpool.
One part of the site revealed a greater depth of archaeology and much of the work was concentrated in this area.
The excavations uncovered a series of rectangular pits and three inter-cutting curving gullies. It is uncertain what the pits were used for and the gullies may relate to some form of internal structure within a kiln, possibly as flues or kiln shelves. The fills were very black and ashy suggesting that they were the waste product of the kiln and stand out from the natural yellow sandstone bedrock.
The excavations recovered large quantities of kiln brick, saggar and other kiln furniture and many tiny fragments of biscuit ware and porcelain.
One of the gullies after excavation with a partly excavated
pit at the back showing the different layers of ash and sand