All make striking garden feature, adding height and charm to any display. They make fabulous planters, indoors or out, excellent bases for sundials and birdbaths, and it should be said, enchanting chimney pots.

Yes, these pots can be installed on top of new chimney stacks. They will give good service for another hundred years!

"A London ordinance of the fourteenth century forbade chimneys made from wood, requiring the use of less combustible materials! Writing in 1577, Harrison regrets the "increase of chimneys because all want them", blaming on their newfound popularity a deterioration in the nation’s health, if not a collective national loss of backbone. "Now we have many chimneys, and yet our tenderlings complain of rheumes, catarrhs, and poses. Then we had none but reredoes and our heads did never ake. For as the smoke in those days was supposed to be a sufficient hardener for the timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to keep the good man and his familie from the quack or pose, where with as then verie few were oft acquainted."

By the time of Charles the Second (1660) chimney pots had become status symbols, and were duly taxed. According to Fletcher “they were considered such important status symbols that the taxes were willingly paid.” However, it is during the nineteenth century that chimney pots reached the height of their popularity, and there were not many stacks built that century that were not surmounted by one of these outrageous chessmen. It was a trade that flourished and declined leaving scant trace of its history bar the pots themselves. “Perhaps no craft has declined so unsung and so unrecorded".

While it is possible to trace the history of English ceramics in great detail, scant record remains of the story of the men, women and, almost certainly, children who produced these glorious follies. One wonders what their reaction would have been had you told them that their handiwork would be crossing the Atlantic Ocean a hundred and fifty years later to the USA.”