Neubor experiments · 02
Scroll, and you go in. Down a Burslem street, through the wad hole, into the oven, down among the firemouths as they light, up the chimney, and out over the six towns — one camera move, no cuts, and not one asset loaded.
Showing the drawn poster and the written account — either you asked for reduced motion, or this browser has no WebGL. The argument is all here.
The written account
Stoke-on-Trent had somewhere over two thousand bottle ovens. Forty-seven survive, none of them lit, and the last firing was in 1978. Everything below is generated at load time from a single seed — the street plan, the terraces, the other ovens, which windows are on — so it comes out the same every time and can be tested rather than admired.
01
Dusk on a Burslem back street, and the thing at the end of it is forty feet of brick.
There were over two thousand bottle ovens in this city and forty-seven are left standing. Nobody who grew up here needs the shape explained and almost nobody has been inside one. That gap — a familiar outside, an unknown inside — is the whole reason this is the demo.
02
The brick cone is not the kiln. It is the coat the kiln wears.
A bottle oven is two buildings, one inside the other. The outer cone is the hovel: a chimney and a weather shell. We go in through the wad hole, which is the low arched door the placers bricked up behind themselves before every firing.
03
Inside, a drum of firebrick twenty-odd feet across, and the roof is a dome with a hole in it.
The inner oven is the thing that actually fires. Its crown is domed so the heat rolls back down onto the ware instead of straight out, and the hole at the top — the damper — is how a fireman controlled a two-day burn with no instrument but the colour of the brick.
04
Fireclay boxes, stacked in rings to the crown, each one holding the ware it protects.
Ware never met the flame. It was packed into saggars — coarse fireclay containers, stacked in bungs from floor to dome — so the fire heated the box and the box heated the pot. A placer filled an oven with about two thousand of them, by hand, from memory.
05
Eight to twelve firemouths around the base, lit in sequence. Now the brick starts to tell you.
Coal went in around the ring and the oven came up over roughly forty hours to about 1,250°C. There was no pyrometer. The fireman read the temperature off the colour of the inside of his own building — black, dull red, cherry, orange, then white — which is precisely what you are watching happen.
06
Up through the damper and into the throat of the chimney, with everything the fire made.
The hovel's job is draught. The gap between the two buildings is a flue, and the cone above the crown accelerates it — which is why the shape exists at all. It was never designed to be beautiful. It looks like that because it is a chimney with an oven in it.
07
Out of the top, into the smoke.
On a firing week the city burned so much coal that the sun went out at noon and the washing came in dirty. The Clean Air Act of 1956 ended it, and the last bottle oven fired in 1978. This one is lit because nobody can light one any more.
08
Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton, Longton — generated, seeded, and all of them alight.
The town under you is not a photograph and not a model anybody drew. It is built at load time from a seeded street plan — every terrace, every oven, every lit window placed by the same number, so it comes out identical every time and can therefore be tested. That is the difference between a render and a website.