By Ines Keane
The bridge is the famous part. The gorge is the better story.
Why here
Wikipedia puts the Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, where the River Severn runs south toward the Bristol Channel. It says the area had coal, iron ore, limestone, fireclay and clay close at hand, and that the deep, wide river made it easy to send goods to the sea. Those are the raw materials of three industries it names: iron, tiles and porcelain. The gorge was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1986, and the civil parish of Ironbridge had 3,275 residents at the 2011 census.
The furnace
Wikipedia’s Coalbrookdale article says Abraham Darby I arrived in 1709 and rebuilt the furnace there to burn coke. The article is careful. It says Coalbrookdale has been claimed as the home of the world’s first coke-fired blast furnace, that this is “not strictly correct,” and that it was the first in Europe to operate successfully for more than a few years. We think that is the right way to put it, and we have followed it.
The same article says the Coalbrookdale Company went on to make cast-iron cooking pots, kettles and steam engine cylinders, and by 1767 the first cast-iron rails for railways. In the nineteenth century the works became known for decorative ironwork, including gates for Hyde Park in London. The blast furnaces closed, it says, perhaps as early as the 1820s, and the foundry finally closed in November 2017. A Museum of Iron opened in 1959, in a Great Warehouse built in 1838, to mark 250 years of the company.
The bridge
Wikipedia credits Thomas Farnolls Pritchard as designer and Abraham Darby III as builder. The Iron Bridge article says work began in November 1777, and the Coalbrookdale article says 1778. The bridge first spanned the river on 2 July 1779 and opened to the public on 1 January 1781. You will see 1779 and 1781 both quoted, and those dates explain why. The span is 100 feet 6 inches, or 30.63 metres. The ironwork weighs 378 long tons 10 hundredweight and comes in almost 1,700 separate components, the heaviest of them 5.5 long tons.
One detail is worth a pause. According to the article, the joints use carpentry methods, mortise and tenon and dovetails, and the parts were cast individually to fit each other and not made to standard sizes. That suggests the builders were working from timber habits and not yet from an engineering handbook. We offer that as our reading, not as a source’s claim.
The bridge was tolled once and has had free public access since 1950. It was made a scheduled monument on 18 January 1934 and a Grade I listed building on 8 April 1983. A conservation project ran from 2017 to 2018, and the bridge reopened on 6 December 2018. Forensic analysis, the article says, led to the original red-brown colour being restored.
Porcelain at Coalport
Wikipedia says the Coalport works made fine British porcelain on its site between 1796 and 1926, and that it was founded in 1796 by John Rose. The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust acquired the site about fifty years after the factory closed, and the museum opened to the public in 1976. The collections include the official National Collections of Caughley and Coalport porcelain.
Tiles at Jackfield
The Jackfield Tile Museum occupies the former works of Craven Dunnill and Company. Wikipedia says Jackfield has been one of Shropshire’s oldest known centres of ceramic production, with a tradition going back to the sixteenth century, and that the Thursfield family settled there in the early 1700s. Craven Dunnill left the works in the early 1950s for Bridgnorth. The Trust bought the site in 1983. Tile manufacture restarted there in 1989, and in 2001 Craven Dunnill took the business over again. Wikipedia says tile making continues on the site today. We have not checked what visitors can see of it.
The collections include work by William De Morgan and a 1,300-tile collection donated in 2014. Several buildings, among them the Blunging House and the Kiln House, were listed in 1992.
How to read the gorge
Three trades shared one valley because the materials and the river were already there. Put the dates side by side: a furnace in 1709, a bridge in 1779, a porcelain works in 1796. Then ask what is made here now. Tiles are one answer, according to Wikipedia. We have not checked the rest, so ask.
Roam first. Shop later.
Makers of ceramics, tiles and cast metalwork can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/