G is for Glazed Tiles

I’m sure we’re probably all familiar with glazed tiles, which are totally different from encaustic tiles that are often seen in churches, or in the hallways of Victorian properties. Encaustic tiles are made from ceramic, and the pattern is created by the use of different coloured clays, whereas the pattern on a glazed tile comes from the actual glaze itself. Unlike glazed tiles, encaustic ones are quite porous. Here’s an example from A.W.N. Pugin, 1843:

Some great examples of Art Nouveau glazed tiles can still be seen in some Edwardian properties, for example along Frederick Street. Sometimes these tiles are simply an embossed pattern, the whole tile being glazed in the same colour, other times these tiles are glazed in different colours.

Art Deco wall and floor tiles often tended to reflect the patterns of the day – brightly coloured with angular shapes, although I haven't personally found any in Loughborough. Here’s an example of the sort of thing I mean, four tiles made into a pattern:

As far as I can see, we no longer have any examples of high gloss tiles adorning our 1920s-1930s pubs, you the know the sort I mean, where the bottom half of the building is clad in shiny, often green tiles, like this one in Southampton from my 2019 visit, and one from my Nottingham visit a few years earlier:

Having said that, there are examples of these tiles in a sort of tan colour on Market Street, which would once have been part of the Old Talbot Inn.

What we do have on some of our pubs, however, are faience tiles – sort of creamy coloured, or pale green – as on the Blacksmiths Arms and the Swan-in-the-Rushes. The dark grey, slightly more glossy tiles of the Royal George, from 1925, are, of course, no longer around.

 

The definition of faience tiles seems to differ with whatever resource you consult! All agree that faience tiles are glazed, but some suggest the tiles are made from glazed terracotta (a clay-based which is glazed at a low temperature, leaving the tile non-vitreous) others that the body of the tile itself is made of a composite material, often said to comprise crushed quartz or sand, with lime and plant ash.

One way of telling if a tile is of the faience type is to tap it. This will give off a dull sound, unlike, for example, porcelain, which when tapped gives a metallic bell-like note. Another way is by looking at an area of the tile that might be chipped. Your posh dinner plates are probably porcelain, and hopefully not chipped, but if they were you’d see the damage would be white: if the item was made from faience, then the chip would be more reddish/brown/beige. A perfect example of this in Loughborough is the beautiful columns we saw under Egyptomania at the former Echo Press offices – distinctly red where the column is damaged, top right.

The other preponderance of faience tiles are to be found on our local cinemas. I’m not going to wax lyrical about them here as the blog is full of posts about them, but do look out for the beige faience tiles on the current Odeon, and the former Odeon (Baxter Gate), and the beautiful brightly coloured tiles that serve as stunning decoration – the yellow, green, and blue patterns on the Odeon, and the black and green bands running across the former Odeon.

Many of these twentieth-century tiles were made by a local company. Perhaps we shall hear more about them in the next post …

Please note: No dinner plates or historical columns were damaged in the creation of this post!

____________________________________ 

I'm taking part in the A-Z April Blogging Challenge!!

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2025). G is for Glazed Tiles. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2025/04/g-is-for-glazed-tiles.html [Accessed 8 April 2025]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

External Links:

By including links to external sources I am not endorsing the websites, the authors, nor the information contained therein, and will not check back to update out-of-date links. Using these links to access external information is entirely the responsibility of the reader of the blog.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne