Bolton
— — a mill town the moors still come down to.
Not only on a wall.
“A market town of about 140,000 people in Greater Manchester, set where the West Pennine Moors slope down toward the River Croal. Bolton ran on cotton for two centuries and built itself a Town Hall that still anchors Victoria Square. Le Mans Crescent curves behind it. Smithills Hall, a timber-framed manor with parts from the fourteenth century, sits at the edge of the moor where the streets give over to bracken and stone walls.
Bolton, 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.
Bolton is a town in Greater Manchester in northwest England, about sixteen kilometres northwest of Manchester city centre. The town sits in a shallow valley along the River Croal, with the West Pennine Moors rising to the north. Its population is roughly 140,000, and the wider metropolitan borough holds about 300,000. Bolton was one of the engines of the cotton-spinning revolution. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule here in 1779 at Hall i' th' Wood, and by the mid-nineteenth century the town held more than two hundred working mills.
The civic centre of Bolton is built in honey-coloured sandstone. The Town Hall on Victoria Square, designed by William Hill and opened in 1873, stands on a Corinthian portico above a long flight of steps. Behind it, Le Mans Crescent sweeps in a long arc of Portland stone, completed in stages between 1932 and 1939 to house the library, museum, magistrates' court, and police headquarters. Smithills Hall, on the northern edge of town, keeps a timber-framed great hall whose oldest sections date to the fourteenth century.
Bolton sits on the Manchester-to-Preston rail line and is twenty minutes from Manchester Piccadilly by train. The Octagon Theatre, on Howell Croft South, has been one of the strongest regional repertory houses in England since it opened in 1967. Bolton Museum, in Le Mans Crescent, holds a significant Egyptology collection assembled from cotton-merchant donors in the late nineteenth century. The West Pennine Moors begin a short walk north of the centre, with Rivington Pike and Winter Hill within easy reach of town for a half-day on foot.