Georgetown
— — the white wooden city behind the seawall.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Guyana, on a flat Atlantic shore where the Demerara River meets the sea. A long seawall holds back the tide; behind it the city is wooden — louvred shutters, white-painted boards, the green spire of St. George's Cathedral rising above a low skyline. The clock on Stabroek Market still keeps the time the river arrives.
Georgetown, 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.
Georgetown is the capital and largest city of Guyana, set at the mouth of the Demerara River on the Atlantic coast of South America. Much of the city lies at or just below high-tide level, defended by a continuous seawall and a network of canals laid down in the Dutch period. The population sits near 120,000 in the city proper. Founded in 1781 and renamed several times before settling on Georgetown in 1812, it remains the country's commercial and political centre, the seat of its parliament and a CARICOM headquarters.
The defining feature of Georgetown is water — what surrounds it and what is held out. The Atlantic shore here sits below high-tide level, so a continuous earthen and concrete seawall runs the length of the city and miles east. Inside, a Dutch-era canal grid still drains the streets; kokers, the wooden sluice gates, open at low tide to release accumulated rainwater. The Demerara River, four kilometres wide at the city's western edge, gave its name to the sugar that was once the colony's whole economy and remains a global commodity.
The city's centre is its 19th-century wooden architecture. St. George's Cathedral, consecrated in 1894 and built entirely of greenheart, rises about 43 metres at its spire and is regularly counted among the tallest wooden buildings standing in the world. Stabroek Market, opened in 1880, anchors the riverside with its cast-iron clock tower. The Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology and the Guyana National Museum sit a few blocks inland. The wider city is a mosaic of Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese, Amerindian, Chinese, and Portuguese-descended communities, which shapes the markets and the food on Regent Street.