Cuddalore
— — the harbour town the Company built around.
Not only on a wall.
“Cuddalore sits on the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu, about twenty kilometres south of Pondicherry where the Gadilam and Ponnaiyar rivers reach the Bay of Bengal. Fort St. David, the East India Company's old stronghold, has weathered down to a ruin on the shore. The town turned industrial after independence — chemical plants, a fishing harbour, the long slow line of the coast. The 2004 tsunami came ashore here.
Cuddalore, 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.
Cuddalore is a coastal port city in Tamil Nadu's Cuddalore district, on the Coromandel Coast about 195 km south of Chennai and 22 km south of Puducherry. The Gadilam and Ponnaiyar rivers meet the Bay of Bengal at the town's edge. Roughly 175,000 people live in the municipality. The British East India Company built Fort St. David here in 1690 on the site of an earlier Dutch outpost. After independence the town's economy shifted toward fertilisers and petrochemicals, with a small fishing harbour active alongside the SIPCOT industrial estate.
Fort St. David is the older bones of the town. The East India Company bought the site in 1690 from the Marathas and rebuilt the fort, which became one of the Company's main southern strongholds after the fall of Madras in 1746. Robert Clive served here as a young writer. The fort changed hands repeatedly through the Anglo-French wars and was finally dismantled. What survives today is a ruin on the shore — bastions, foundations, a stretch of seaward wall — managed by the Archaeological Survey of India.
The town holds two river mouths and a long stretch of the Coromandel coastline. The Gadilam runs through the northern edge of the city and the Ponnaiyar empties to the south. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 came ashore along this coast, killing hundreds in Cuddalore district and washing across the harbour. Silver Beach south of town is one of the longer beaches on the Coromandel. The fishing harbour at the Old Town river mouth still moves catch each morning before the heat lifts.