Manchester
— — a city of brick that turned the world.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of red brick and rain in the northwest of England, where the cotton mills became music halls and the music halls became the songs the rest of the country still hums. The Bridgewater Canal still cuts through Castlefield. The Town Hall clock still keeps the centre. The studio knows Manchester by the colour the wet brick goes at six in the evening.
Manchester, 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.
Manchester is a city in northwest England, the regional capital of the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester, with a city population near 552,000 in the 2021 census and a wider metropolitan area of about 2.8 million. The Romans founded the fort of Mamucium on a sandstone bluff above the River Irwell around AD 79. The modern city grew through the cotton trade and was widely described as the world's first industrial city by the mid-nineteenth century, anchored by its mills, the Bridgewater Canal, and the 1830 Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
Red Accrington brick gives the older streets their colour. Alfred Waterhouse's Town Hall, opened in 1877 in neo-Gothic stone, anchors Albert Square, and its 87-metre clock tower still keeps the centre. The John Rylands Library, completed in 1900 by Basil Champneys for Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband, holds early printed books behind a sandstone facade on Deansgate. Manchester Cathedral, mostly rebuilt in the fifteenth century on the site of an earlier parish church, sits at the old crossing of the River Irwell and the Irk.
The defining weather is the soft persistent rain off the Irish Sea. Manchester records around 867 millimetres of rainfall a year, spread across roughly 152 wet days, which is less than its reputation suggests but enough to keep the brick dark and the pavements reflecting. Winters are mild and grey, with January averages near 4°C, and summers stay temperate, with July highs in the low twenties. The Met Office station at Ringway, just south of the city, has tracked the pattern continuously since 1946.