Port Harcourt
— — the garden city the oil age built and the river still holds.
Not only on a wall.
“Port Harcourt sits where the Bonny River begins its long bend toward the Gulf of Guinea. The British laid it out in 1912 as a coal port for the colliery upcountry; oil came later, and stayed. The Old GRA still keeps the wide streets and flame trees that earned the city its garden name. Pleasure Park draws families on Sunday afternoons. The fishing piers at Marine Base work from before dawn. The river is the constant: tidal, brown, busy with barges, threading through everything the city decides to do next. — from the studio
Port Harcourt, 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.
Port Harcourt is the capital of Rivers State and the principal city of the Niger Delta, in southern Nigeria. The site, on the Bonny River roughly 66 kilometres from the Gulf of Guinea, was selected in 1912 by the British colonial administration as a port for coal exports from the Enugu fields. Lewis Vernon Harcourt, then Colonial Secretary, gave the city its name. The 1956 discovery of commercial oil at Oloibiri reshaped the region, and Port Harcourt became the centre of Nigeria's petroleum industry. Greater Port Harcourt has grown to more than two million residents.
The climate is tropical monsoon. The wet season runs from March through October, with rainfall often exceeding 2,400 millimetres a year, among the highest in Nigeria. The dry harmattan reaches the delta only briefly in December and January, carrying fine Saharan dust south on the trade winds and softening the light to a warm haze. Mangrove and freshwater swamp forest still ring the river's outer reaches. The Bonny estuary is a major route for tanker traffic out of the Port Harcourt and Onne terminals operated by the Nigerian Ports Authority.
The Old Government Reserved Area, laid out in the colonial period along Aggrey Road and the parallel avenues, is the easiest district to walk. Pleasure Park near the Polo Club opens daily and is busiest on weekends. The Port Harcourt Tourist Beach sits on the Bonny waterfront. Port Harcourt International Airport at Omagwa, about 30 kilometres north of the city centre, is the principal gateway. Visitors typically arrive via Lagos or Abuja on domestic carriers; international flights connect through Lagos and Accra.