Tema
— — a city laid out on a drawing board, then weathered by the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Ghana's deepwater port and the country's planned industrial city, built from the late 1950s on what had been a small fishing village. The grid of numbered communities runs back from the harbour; the fishing harbour at Tema Newtown still launches wooden canoes against a skyline of container cranes. The Greenwich Meridian crosses the city, marked by a small monument, and the long sea wall takes a steady Atlantic swell. Late afternoon the light goes copper over the gantries, and the smell of woodsmoke and salt drifts up from the canoe beach. from the studio
Tema, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tema is a coastal city in Ghana's Greater Accra Region, roughly twenty-five kilometres east of the capital. It was developed from the late 1950s under President Kwame Nkrumah as a planned port and industrial city to serve the new Volta River hydroelectric scheme and the country's post-independence economy. The harbour, built between 1954 and 1962, is the largest in West Africa by container throughput and handles the bulk of Ghana's seaborne trade. The Greenwich Meridian passes directly through the city, one of only a handful of inhabited places where this is true. Population today is roughly four hundred thousand.
The city's master plan was drawn in the 1950s by Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis and his firm, organised into numbered Communities radiating from the port. Each Community was designed as a self-contained neighbourhood with schools, markets, and walking distances scaled to a child. The grid is now softened by decades of accretion — extensions, market stalls, repainted concrete — but the bones of the Doxiadis plan are still legible from the air. Tema Newtown, the original fishing village displaced when the harbour was built, sits on the western edge of the port and remains an active artisanal canoe beach.
Tema sits about a forty-minute drive east from central Accra along the Tema Motorway, Ghana's first motorway, opened in 1965. Most visitors come for the port or for transit to the Volta Region further east. The Meridian monument sits on a roundabout in Community 7; the fishing harbour at Tema Newtown can be visited respectfully in the morning when the canoes return. The dry, dusty harmattan season runs roughly from December through February; the long rains come in May and June. The Atlantic surf is strong and the offshore current sharp — swimming is generally not advised from the city beach.