H is for Hathern Station Brick and Terra Cotta Company, Hathernware, and the Hodson Family

Yesterday we had a look at glazed tiles, which included those on some of Loughborough’s pubs and cinemas. The makers of these tiles were a local company …

Originally called Hathern Station Brick and terra Cotta Company, the firm was started in 1874 by George Hodson (1844-1907), along with his brother, James, at a site between Sutton Bonington and Hathern, close to Hathern Station – which, I guess, is where part of the firm’s name came from. The company also had a brick works near Tamworth, called the Cliff Works, which produced blue engineering bricks.

The speciality of the company was initially in terra cotta, and many local buildings are beautifully decorated with terra cotta embellishments. Examples are the Carnegie Library on Granby Street, and Lloyds Bank on High Street, but not BetFred (previously Gartons estate agents, but originally opened as a Temperance Hall), which has terra cotta from J.C. Edwards of North Wales.

The story of the company and the family behind it is a very long one, and I don’t have space to tell it all here, so let’s move on to the Art Deco period. The Hathern company began making faience tiles towards the end of the nineteenth century, as architects began to use glazed ceramics on building façades. This product was known as Hathernware Faience, and eventually, in 1938 the company changed its name to Hathernware. The tiles were made from glazed terracotta which was moulded rather than carved to imitate marble and granite surfaces.

There are examples of Hathern’s tiles across the country. I believe Hathernware had the contract for cinemas in the Odeon chain, and certainly some Burton’s Menswear stores were also of Hathernware. In the 1970s the company merged with Shaws, and was taken over by Ibstock Brick in 1990. During that period, much of the work was concentrated on renovations, and this included repairs to the Wrigley Building in Chicago. The local site eventually closed in 2004, but the Hathern name is now owned by Michelmersh Brick Holdings, who still produce terracotta and faience ware under the Hathern name.

Locally, we have many examples of buildings clad in Hathernware’s faience, not least the original Odeon on Baxter Gate, and the current Odeon on Cattle Market, on the former Echo Press offices on Swan Street, and many others.   

PIC – Odeon, Beacon Bingo, Echo   

 

 

____________________________________ 

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). H is for Hathern Station Brick and Terra Cotta Company, Hathernware, and the  Hodson Family. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2025/04/h-is-for-hathern-station-brick-and.html  [Accessed 9 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