Enugu
— — the city the coal seam built.
Not only on a wall.
“Enugu sits on the western edge of the Udi Plateau, where a coal seam found in 1909 turned a quiet escarpment village into the capital of what the British called the Eastern Region. The hills above Milken still hold the old mine mouths. From the Polo Park ridge the city reads as red roofs and udara trees, with the Ngwo escarpment dropping away west. Igbo land, Coal City, the slow heart of the southeast. Quiet at first light, and then not.
Enugu, 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.
Enugu is the capital of Enugu State in southeastern Nigeria, set on the western flank of the Udi Plateau roughly 223 metres above sea level. The city took shape after a 1909 coal discovery on Udi Hill by a British prospecting party led by Albert Kitson, and the rail line down to Port Harcourt followed in 1916. From 1929 until 1967 it served as headquarters of the Eastern Region; it was briefly capital of the secessionist Biafra. Today it anchors Igbo cultural life in the southeast, with the University of Nigeria across the line at Nsukka.
The bones of Enugu are sub-bituminous coal in the Mamu Formation, laid down in the late Cretaceous along the Anambra Basin. The Onyeama and Okpara mines worked the seam for most of the twentieth century before output collapsed in the 1990s. The escarpment itself is sandstone and shale, cut by short streams that drop west toward the Anambra River. The red lateritic soils on the ridge give the older quarters their colour, and the same iron-rich earth shows up in the bricks of the colonial-era station and the long railway sheds at Ngwo.
Enugu is reached by air through Akanu Ibiam International Airport, about 8 kilometres south of the centre, with daily flights from Lagos and Abuja. The road east from Onitsha climbs the Milken Hill in a single long bend that gives the first city view. Nike Lake, the Awhum waterfall north of Ngwo, and the Ngwo Pine Forest cave sit within an hour of the centre. The dry harmattan months from December to February bring the clearest light on the escarpment; the rains from April through October are heavy and the hills hold cloud past mid-morning.