Adopt a potter: An alternative training scheme

Maze Hill Pottery is an apt name for this diminutive studio in the heart of Greenwich in Southeast London. Situated at the end of a labyrinth of streets that seem to get progressively narrower, and having tramped for miles from the nearest tube station, it was a slow dawning to realise that as this place was originally the ticket office for Maze Hill Station, albeit back in 1873, there is still a functioning platform immediately behind what is now Lisa Hammond’s studio.

Maze Hill Station’s working life as a ticket office became obsolete during the 1970s and the little building stood empty for several years before Hammond took it over in 1994. With the help of Nick Tipton, (then a technician at Goldsmiths College in London where Hammond had been teaching ceramics), she built her kiln - the first soda glaze, gas fired trolley kiln in the UK, and started producing functional ware. Hers is an auspicious site, as it is only a few miles from the first known salt glaze kiln in the UK that was situated by