
Buildings
THE Bottle Kilns
The bottle kilns, in Corbridge, Northumberland, are amongst the remains of Walker’s Pottery. Walker’s Pottery was a nineteenth and early twentieth-century, family-run pottery works that took on the entire process of turning raw clay from nearby fields into finished goods like bricks, pipes and tiles to then be transported and sold. As rural bottle kilns surviving in such condition are so rare (there are only 3 in the North East), these examples are both Grade II* listed buildings and Scheduled Monuments.
2015 – Today
Our work
Once Walkers closed c.1910, the site began to fall into disrepair. The Tyne and Wear Industrial Monuments Trust acquired the kilns in 1979 and undertook early stabilisation.
Over 20 years ago, the Tyne and Wear Industrial Monument Trust was subsumed by T+WBPT
In 2003, a buildings survey report was conducted by Historic England and the kilns were placed on the Heritage at Risk Register.
In 2017, after 41 years of hard work, the Bottle Kilns were removed from Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register. The team working on the kilns was led by Tristan Spicer of Doonan Architects and the work was undertaken by Stone Technical Services. MEWP (Mobile Elevating Work Platforms) to get close to the curving brickwork.
Works included stabilising and preserving the structures while a new use for them is found.





Historic England has been delighted to work with the Trust and [Northumberland County Council] to ensure that these remarkable buildings are repaired and that important traditional repair skills are being embedded in future generations of builders and masons.
Kate Wilson, Historic england
1893 – 2015
History
The pottery was established in the early to mid-nineteenth century and, by 1841, it was described as a ‘firebrick and earthenware manufacturer’.
In the Ordnance Survey map of 1860, we can see that the pottery was well established and now had three bottle kilns, making and drying rooms, a puddling pit, and a tramway.
Then, in 1895, a downdraft kiln was built over the levelled remains of one of the bottle kilns. Several Newcastle, or horizontal, kilns, another drying room, a stables and walled yard were also added by this time.
The pottery continued to be used until the early twentieth century.



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