Grogworks Workshop

Every mug, jug and bowl we make begins as salvaged factory clay, which travels through five separate stages in the yard before it is ever allowed near a glaze.

It began in 1998 with one cracked sagger and the idea that a discarded kiln box was still perfectly good clay. These days Grogworks works with a great deal more than factory offcuts — we blend reclaimed, remilled and short-run bodies into every mug, jug and bowl that leaves the yard. But salvaged industrial stoneware is still the thing everybody comes to see. Here is how it travels from a shuttered pottery belt in the north to a one-off vessel on your table, in five stages.

Two clay-covered hands closing around a form turning on a wheelhead. Photo by Quino Al on StockSnap

1. Sourcing clay: driving the old kiln belts

Grogworks vessels are thrown only from reclaimed industrial stoneware. But finding enough usable body for roughly 62,000 pieces a year? Not simple. Our salvage crew works the closed pottery belts of northern Europe for the best-firing clays — up to 180 tonnes of it each year — and hauls them back to the yard in Ghent.

First things first: we screen every batch for heavy metals so that a Grogworks piece is safe on a table.

A long abandoned works building under open sky, one of the closed pottery belts our crew buys from. Photo by Ryan McGuire on StockSnap

A pair of hands wedging a block of grey reclaimed body on a plaster bench. Photo by Alex Jones on StockSnap

2. Opening it up: where the salvage gets broken down

Now the slow work starts. The crew gets hands-on with mallets, wire and a good deal of patience, stripping out plaster, fired grit and metal fixings to turn a pallet of salvage into raw body.

Batches that are too dry, over-grogged or short of plasticity get set aside. The good ones are cut into pugmill-sized blocks and sorted by burn colour.

3. Slaking and blunging: with rain off the shed roof

Three deep blungers wash out the road dust and plaster to bring back the body's real colour and tooth. Rain we collect on the shed roof covers about half the water we need.

Waste heat off the drying floor warms the fresh water, and at the end of every cycle we settle the slip — by then nearly clean — and reclaim it for the next batch.

When the blocks come off the drying racks, we decide which form suits each body best.

Deep settling tanks in a daylit shed where salvaged clay is slaked and washed. Photo by Cyrille Duverne on StockSnap

Hands steadying a freshly pulled terracotta bottle at the wheelhead. Photo by yugixel on StockSnap

4. Throwing to form: where vessels become one-of-a-kind

Pulling a form is far more than muscle. Because it is here — at the wheelhead — that we decide what each Grogworks one-off is going to be.

We keep a profile gauge for every silhouette and hold it against the wall as the piece rises, to get the truest curve — and as many vessels as the block will give — out of each batch. Some forms are thrown by hand, some are jollied; every pull counts.

Then the greenware is crated off to our firing partners across Europe for the glaze burn.

5. From the kiln back to the table

In Puglia, Moravia and Galicia our long-standing partner kilns take the greenware up to 1,260 °C and hold it there until the glaze pulls into place.

Back in Ghent we ring-test every piece, weigh it, and photograph it to studio standard.

Finally they head to Grogworks shops, stockists, or straight to a customer's table anywhere in the world from our online store.

Working standards

For Grogworks it matters that social and ecological standards hold all the way down the chain. That is why we and our kiln partners work to a shared Working Charter that sets out how the work gets done and keeps the day-to-day dealings between us open.

Rows of celadon-glazed bottles cooling after the glaze burn. Photo by Jessica Ruscello on StockSnap

The Grogworks circuit at a glance

Turning salvaged industrial clay into one-off vessels takes a good deal more than five steps — it is a whole circuit. From its first life on a factory line to becoming the mug you reach for before anything else, every Grogworks one-off passes through a long chain of hands.

By working with reclaimed bodies and keeping haulage legs short, we hold our carbon load down, and we keep hunting for ways to press it lower still. Want to know where we stand and what comes next? Read the Material Report.