Monrovia
— — a capital that remembers the ships that brought it home.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Liberia, set on a peninsula between the Atlantic and the Mesurado River. Founded in 1822 by free Black Americans returning across the ocean, named for President James Monroe. The old houses on Broad Street still carry the bones of nineteenth-century New England, weathered now by salt and rain and the long heat of the West African coast.
Monrovia, 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.
Monrovia sits on Cape Mesurado, the rocky peninsula where the Mesurado River meets the Atlantic, in western Liberia. The city was founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society as a settlement for freed African Americans, and named the following year for U.S. President James Monroe. It is the seat of government and the country's largest city, with roughly one and a half million residents in the wider metropolitan area. Providence Island, in the river mouth, is where the first settlers landed.
The older quarters above the harbour hold a particular kind of building: pitched-roof clapboard houses raised on brick piers, with wide verandas and louvred shutters, brought across the ocean in the heads of the Americo-Liberian settlers. Many line Broad Street and Ashmun Street in the original town grid. Some have stood since the 1860s. The form is recognisable to anyone who knows the antebellum coastal South, weathered now by a century and a half of monsoon rain, sea salt, and tropical sun.
Monrovia is one of the wettest capitals on earth. The rainy season runs from May through October and delivers roughly 5,000 millimetres of rainfall a year, fed by the southwest monsoon off the Gulf of Guinea. The harmattan, the dry Saharan wind, brushes the coast lightly between December and February. Temperatures sit between 23 and 30 degrees Celsius across the year. The light off the Atlantic is silvered most mornings and gold in the late afternoon, when the city's western edge faces directly into the sun.