The Maws factory history

One Valley, Many Legacies

Walk along the Severn at Jackfield and you’re treading on the bones of the British tile industry.

In the late nineteenth century, within little more than a mile of riverbank, five great names shaped, glazed and fired their way into history — Maw & Co, Craven Dunnill, Milburgh, Wallace, and Exley’s.

Their chimneys once blurred the skyline; their tiles still glow in churches, schools, and front rooms across the world.

A Valley Built from Clay and Coal

Jackfield offered everything an ambitious manufacturer could want: the Broseley and Benthall clays, rich and workable; coal seams close to the surface; and the River Severn for shipping — later joined by the Great Western Railway for speed.

Here, art and industry shared the same geography.

Each works found its niche.

• Maw & Co created the masterpieces: encaustic floors, hand-painted majolica, mosaics and relief tiles bright with myth and history.

• Craven Dunnill, their equally gifted neighbour, specialised in decorative wall and floor tiles — vivid glazes, clean geometry, and exceptional craftsmanship.

• Milburgh, founded by the Prestage family in 1870, focused on roof and industrial tiles, pioneering the efficient up-and-down (downdraught) kiln.

• Wallace, also Prestage, based over in Broseley, made plain wall and roof tiles for post-war building.

• Exley’s, up in Broseley Wood, produced ridge tiles and paving slabs, quietly fuelling the construction trade that surrounded the Gorge. Imge shows Milburgh Tile Works, Calcutts Road, Jackfield Exleys tileries in the foreground

Together they made Jackfield a paradox — a place where mud became beauty.

Maw & Co — From Clay to Craft

The Maw story began in Worcester in 1850, when John Hornby Maw and his sons George and Arthur started out making small batches of decorative tiles.

But the local clay wasn’t up to their ambitions.

By 1852, the whole operation — kilns, staff, and family — had moved west to Benthall, on the hillside above the Severn.

Their first works sat just above the old waterwheel — small, steep, and increasingly impractical.

By the early 1880s, the business needed more room and better transport links.

So, in 1883, they built a new five-acre factory on the riverbank at Jackfield, designed by Charles Lynam, the Potteries’ go-to architect for industrial elegance.

Step beneath the grand archway today and the tilework still reads:

> “Maw & Co. Benthall Works — Worcester 1850 — Benthall 1852 — Rebuilt 1883.”

It’s a beautiful lie.

Geographically, this is Jackfield, not Benthall.

But the name honoured their earlier hillside home — a thread of continuity in glazed lettering.

Lynam’s design worked like clockwork.

• North/front: offices, showroom, warehouses, and packing rooms, feeding directly to the new road and Maw & Co’s private railway siding on the Severn Valley line.

• East/riverside: long manufacturing ranges, mess rooms and workshops.

• South: a vast pressing shop, nearly 100 feet long, where pulverised clays dropped from the mill above into waiting moulds.

• West: two-storey drying stoves, heated by exhaust steam, with painting and printing shops above.

The site even had its own gasworks, firebrick workshops, and clay pits higher up the slope.

Local red clay weathered outdoors for up to three years, mixed with Dorset ball clay, china clay, Cornish stone, and flints to achieve perfect texture and colour.

At its height, the factory employed over 400 people and produced more than 20 million tiles a year — making it the largest tileworks in the world.

If you follow the signs today to the Maws Craft Centre, you’re entering only a fraction of what once stood here.

The surviving courtyard — now home to artists’ studios and the Tile Press Café — formed just one third of the original factory.

The rest, a sprawl of workshops, slip houses, kilns, chimneys and warehouses, was demolished between 1974 and 1977 after years of dereliction.

At its height, more than 400 people worked on this five-acre site.

The long open yard running through the middle wasn’t ornamental; it was the nerve centre of the operation.

Carts rattled constantly through it, bringing in coal and clay and carrying out finished tiles.

The space gave vital light, air and access to the endless kilns that flanked the buildings on every side.

Behind the works ran Maw’s private Great Western Railway siding, complete with a platform known locally as Jackfield Halt.

From there, crates of tiles left the packing rooms and rolled straight into wagons — bound for cathedrals, civic halls and grand Victorian foyers across the world.

Here, industry moved with the rhythm of devotion.

To walk through it now is to feel what one visitor once called “a factory like a cathedral” — light, ordered, and built for beauty as much as production.

Tiles for the World

Maw & Co’s artistry covered every imaginable surface — from the hearth to the hotel lobby, the shopfront to the storybook.

Their designs were as varied as the lives they brightened.

In homes, encaustic and majolica fireplace surrounds brought colour and pattern to even the smallest parlour.

Their pattern catalogues, filled with printed tile layouts in russet, olive, and cobalt, were works of art themselves.

Working with artists such as Walter Crane, Maw also produced richly decorated art pottery — mythic figures, birds, and serpents painted in flowing red and gold lustres.

Their creativity embraced storytelling too.

The whimsical “Alice in Wonderland” tiles, hand-painted with Carroll’s famous characters among tulips and ivy, brought fantasy into the tiled nursery.

Not all of Maw’s work lived indoors.

Their architectural tiles still line the frontage of M. Davis, Butcher in Broseley — an everyday shopfront turned masterpiece.

Elsewhere across the Gorge, fragments of exterior wall tiling remain: floral diamonds, quatrefoils and scrolling tendrils, still bright beneath the moss.

Inside the Jackfield Tile Museum, the iconic “Floreat Salopia” roundel — Latin for “May Shropshire Flourish” — glows with red and cream tesserae.

Maw’s love of history and nature appeared in their medieval figure tiles and bird series.

From the domestic fireplace to fine art, from the butcher’s shop to the nursery wall, Maw’s tiles weren’t just decoration — they were a philosophy made tangible: the belief that beauty should live everywhere.

Family and Community

The Maws were very much of the Gorge.

Arthur Maw and his family lived at the Valley Hotel in Ironbridge — tiled, naturally, with the firm’s own designs.

Their tiles also gleam inside The Tontine by the bridge, and on the handsome frontage of M. Davis, Butcher in Broseley.

The company wasn’t just an employer; it was a community.

Men and women worked side by side, many walking down from Broseley or Benthall each morning.

During the First World War, 149 employees left to serve.

In August 1920, Lord and Lady Forester unveiled the Maw & Co. Roll of Honour in the office stair hall.

Three panels of cream and green encaustic tile list their names — 126 who returned, 19 who did not.

Two won the Military Medal, two the Croix de Guerre.

Around them, the stairwell’s tiled dado shows classical figures drawn from Plato’s Republic; the floor below is a mosaic, lovingly restored in 1991 by Lesley Durbin and Su Turner of the Jackfield Conservation Studio.

The Siding and the Last Train

Maw’s private railway siding opened in 1877, extended in 1883, and was still busy well into the 1950s — shunting wagons of tiles straight from the packing rooms.

A small McKenzie & Holland signal box once controlled access; later, it was replaced by a simple ground frame.

The last recorded goods trains served the siding in 1959, marking the end of an era when Maws could send its work from Jackfield to London, Liverpool or Calcutta without ever touching a road.

The Final Firing

Maws merged with the Campbell Tile Co. in 1961 and soldiered on through a decade of shrinking demand.

The final working day was 31 December 1969.

The factory officially closed in January 1970.

For four years, it stood silent — machinery and tools left exactly as they were.

Between 1974 and 1977, more than two-thirds of the site was demolished, leaving only the long courtyard block we know today.

The Phoenix Years

In the early 1980s, the Telford Development Corporation and the Manpower Services Commission launched a rescue.

Over four years (1981–1985), hundreds of workers trained here in heritage skills, converting the surviving ranges into 30 workshops and 12 maisonettes — the largest MSC project in the West Midlands.

When the TDC wound down, a group of tenants bought the site in 1988, forming Maws Craft Centre (Jackfield) Ltd.

They’ve owned and managed it ever since, ploughing rental income back into restoration.

Maws Today – Craft, Colour and Continuity

Walk through the courtyard now and you’ll still feel the rhythm of industry — not the hiss of steam and glaze, but the hum of creativity.

Artists, designers and makers work in the same tall-windowed rooms once filled with clay dust and sunlight.

Set in the old works canteen, the Tile Press Café is the social heart of the site — a place to pause, chat and imagine the stories that have soaked into the brickwork.

Its name honours the great presses that once stamped thousands of tiles a day.

Recently relocated within the Maws site, Nettie of the Gorge brings artistry and sustainability together in natural, untamed floral designs.

Through the Ironbridge Gorge Flower School, workshops teach foam-free, eco-conscious techniques that celebrate the changing seasons.

Founded by Sarah, this lively art and drama studio is housed within the historic works.

After 25 years in education, Sarah moved her creative practice here in 2019 and has since transformed it into an accredited Trinity College London centre.

Previously known as House of Wild Cards.

Maws’ spirit of craftsmanship lives on in every corner of the courtyard.

A few of the other businesses mentioned include:

• Coin Design

• Amanda Hillier Printmaking

• Fieldfare Candle Company

• Hold Upon Heart

• Rod Willis (fine art)

Each studio adds a new layer to the site’s story — keeping alive the mix of artistry, trade and individuality that once made Jackfield famous.

Legacy in Glaze and Memory

The great tileworks of Jackfield — Maw & Co, Craven Dunnill, Milburgh, Wallace, and Exley’s — may no longer smoke across the valley, but their legacy runs deep in the clay and the community.

Above Maws’ archway, the tiled legend still gleams:

> “Maw & Co. Benthall Works — Worcester 1850 — Benthall 1852 — Rebuilt 1883.”

Many of the original Maw tiles can now be seen just along the road at the Jackfield Tile Museum, displayed beside Craven Dunnill’s own work — a reminder that, although the factories have changed, their craftsmanship endures in colour, pattern, and fired earth.

It’s part truth, part poetry — a statement of endurance, of craft, and of belonging.

And if you step through that same arch today, you’ll see the story continuing: not in kilns and chimneys, but in every brushstroke, bloom, and handmade thing that leaves the courtyard.

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