Inside the workshop: a week with our ceramics studio

The studio starts at six. Clay is wedged by hand — pushed, folded and turned to drive out air pockets that would otherwise burst in the kiln — and by seven the first wheels are running.

A thrown mug takes roughly eleven minutes on the wheel and another two weeks before it is finished. It dries to leather-hard, gets turned on the wheel a second time to cut the foot, dries fully, then goes through a bisque firing at 1,000°C before it is glazed and fired again at 1,260°C.

That second firing is where the studio loses pieces. A glaze that pooled too thickly will run and fuse a mug to the kiln shelf. On a bad week they lose one in twelve. Those pieces are not sold; they are broken down and the grog is folded back into future batches.

The variation you see between two of our bowls is not tolerance drift — it is the record of two different hands on two different mornings. We ask the studio to hold dimensions within a few millimetres, and we ask for nothing beyond that.

It is slower and more expensive than slip-casting, and it is the reason a Marlow bowl feels different in the hand from something pressed out by the thousand.