Muridke
— — the rice town the trunk road runs through.
Not only on a wall.
“Muridke sits along the Grand Trunk Road, the old Mughal-and-British highway that still carries the freight between Lahore and Gujranwala. The country around it is flat irrigated Punjab — rice paddies in summer, wheat in winter, canals running off the Upper Chenab. Trucks idle outside the rice mills on the bypass. The bazaar in the centre keeps its own time. — from the studio
Muridke, 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.
Muridke is a city in Sheikhupura District in the Punjab province of Pakistan, on the Grand Trunk Road about 35 kilometres north of Lahore and roughly the same distance south of Gujranwala. It is the headquarters of Muridke Tehsil and had a population of around 175,000 at the 2017 census. The surrounding country is part of the Rechna Doab, the alluvial plain between the Ravi and Chenab rivers, and is irrigated by the canals of the Upper Chenab system. The local economy is built on rice and wheat agriculture and on the rice mills clustered along the bypass.
The light over Muridke is plain Punjabi light — long flat horizons, dust hanging in the late afternoon, the winter fog that the locals call dhund settling low across the fields from December into January. The town sits at about 221 metres above sea level on land that has been farmed continuously since the Indus civilisation. Summer monsoon rains reach the doab in July and August, brief and heavy, and the canals run full. Outside those months the sky stays open for weeks at a time and the air smells of paddy stubble in November.
Muridke is reached most easily by road. The Grand Trunk Road, now National Highway N-5, runs straight through the town and connects it to Lahore in under an hour outside rush hour. The Lahore-Rawalpindi M-2 motorway passes a short distance to the west with an interchange at Kala Shah Kaku. The Pakistan Railways main line follows the same corridor with a station at Muridke. Most visitors are en route between Lahore and Gujranwala or Sialkot; the town itself is a working agricultural and industrial centre rather than a tourist stop.