Hoxton Gardenware is a youth-led not-for-profit enterprise producing distinctive, small-batch terracotta gardenware inspired by functional British garden pottery from the Roman to Victorian periods.
Commissioned by Create and facilitated by artist Aaron Angell and potter Edmund Davies, Hoxton Gardenware is a socially and economically sustainable manufacturing and teaching facility for local young people, based at Troy Town Art Pottery on Hoxton Street, East London.
Developed with a belief in the creative potential of manufacturing, the project establishes a distinctive model of ceramics production, providing high-quality training and paid employment opportunities for local 18-24-year olds.
Our approach is to use studio-pottery techniques rather than the processes of industrial design to produce high-quality indoor and outdoor garden terracotta. We are inspired in particular by the history of Hoxton as London’s traditional nursery district, with Troy Town itself sitting on the site where the first plant was artificially hybridised in 1717 by nurseryman and amateur biologist Thomas Fairchild. ‘Fairchild’s Mule’ was a sterile hybrid of two plants in the Dianthus genus: a Sweet William and a Carnation Pink.
Hoxton Gardenware is kindly supported by Bank of America and Hackney Council’s Shoreditch and Hoxton Art Fund, created from a levy on developers to support arts and culture programmes that bring different communities together.
Frontispiece from Thomas Fairchild’s The City Gardener (1722), showing a fanciful view of Fairchild’s nursery at the north end of what is now Hoxton Street. In the background one can see raised hothouses in which pineapples and other exotics were grown. The foreground shows one of Fairchild’s proudest specimens in flower, Agave americana, the ‘Great American Aloe’.
Our Agave americana today, which has never flowered.
