Lagos
— — a city that wakes before the sun does.
Not only on a wall.
“Lagos opens before dawn and does not close. Twenty million people across the islands and the mainland, the lagoon between them holding the small boats and the long traffic of bridges. Victoria Island and Lekki face the Atlantic; the old city sits inland on Lagos Island. The air carries diesel, frying plantain, and the bassline of a city that exports its own sound. from the studio
Lagos, 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.
Lagos is the largest city in Nigeria and, by most counts, the largest urban area in Africa, with a metropolitan population estimated above twenty million. It sits on the Bight of Benin, the inner curve of the West African coast, built around the Lagos Lagoon and a chain of barrier islands. The Yoruba Awori people settled the area centuries before the Portuguese named it Lagos in the late fifteenth century. The federal capital moved to Abuja in 1991, but Lagos remains Nigeria's commercial and cultural centre.
The Lagos Lagoon is the largest of a chain of coastal lagoons along the West African coast — about six thousand square kilometres of brackish water, separated from the Atlantic by sandy barrier islands. The Third Mainland Bridge, finished in 1990 at almost twelve kilometres long, was for years the longest in Africa. Daily life moves on the water as much as the road: ferries between Ikoyi and the mainland, fishing pirogues out of Makoko, and tankers waiting their turn in the Apapa anchorage.
Lagos sits about six degrees north of the equator, so the temperature stays near thirty degrees Celsius almost every day of the year. Two seasons run the calendar: a long wet from April through October and a drier, harmattan-touched stretch from November into March. The city's sound is its own weather — Afrobeats and Fuji from the corner speakers, the call of conductors at the danfo stops, the constant horn-and-engine drone the locals simply call Lagos traffic.