Our next industrial archeology site was Nantgarw pottery. Instead of a large factory, this facility was a home, with kilns in the back and workshops in the basement. I don't know how many people worked here during its heydey, but it was started as a family operation by William Billingsley, an expert pottery painter who left a pottery in Derby to start his own business here in 1813. It is immediately adjacent to canal, handy for receiving materials and sending out products. Billingsley struggled to make porcelain of the quality made by Sevres, in France. He may have succeeded in that, but eventually he failed economically, since he the process he used had a very low yield, losing many works in the firing process. One writer said in a paper given at the Royal Institution in London in 1888 that "Nantgarw porcelain-china was one of the foremost manufactures of the kind ever produced." NEXT LIST