Alang Ship Breaking Yard
— — the coast where the world's ships come to rest.
Not only on a wall.
“A ten-kilometre stretch of mud beach on the Gulf of Khambhat in Gujarat, where a large share of the world's retired ocean ships are run aground and slowly taken apart by hand. Tankers, container ships, naval cruisers: they come up on the spring tides at full speed and are dismantled plate by plate. The yard has been working since 1983.
Alang Ship Breaking Yard, 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.
Alang lies on the western shore of the Gulf of Khambhat in Bhavnagar district, Gujarat, about 50 kilometres south of Bhavnagar city on the Saurashtra peninsula. The shore is unusual: a long, gently sloping mudflat with a tidal range of more than ten metres on spring tides, which lets large vessels be driven straight up the beach at full speed and grounded permanently. The yard is divided into roughly 150 plots, leased and regulated by the Gujarat Maritime Board, and has operated continuously since 1983.
The plates come off in a sequence with its own slow rhythm: cutting torches at the bow, the long fall of hull plate to the sand, gangs of cutters working a vessel down to her keelson over six to eight months. The shore can hold thirty or more ships at a time. At low tide the yard is loud with cutting and winching; at high tide, with the wind off the Gulf, the line of grounded hulls looks almost still.
Alang is a working industrial site, not a tourist destination, and access to the plots is restricted to plot owners, workers, and accredited inspectors. The nearest town is Bhavnagar, reached by road from Ahmedabad in about four hours or by direct flight to Bhavnagar Airport. The Sosiya village road runs along a ridge above the beach and gives a distant view of the line of hulls. India ratified the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships in 2019.