A blue plaque on the building immediately conveys that the building
is important or someone very significant lived there.
Ned Heywood has been making
heritage ceramics for 16 years and blue plaques for the past
10.
All are made from white
stoneware clay fired to 1280°C giving very desirable properties:-
harder than steel (cannot be scratched with steel tools),
unaffected by all solvents and most acids, colourfast forever,
frost-proof, rot-proof, rodent-proof and flame-proof. They can be
expected to last for many hundreds of years without maintenance.
These characteristics of ceramic materials are due to them being
composed of metal oxides, they are not attacked by oxygen, the
element that causes most materials to rust, fade or
decay.
These properties, combined with
the high skills of the British pottery industry, resulted in the
Victorian's choice of ceramic for the first London blue plaque
scheme over 140 years ago.
Although the ways Ned forms soft clay and creates precise lettering use innovative techniques,
the finished products are part of the very long tradition of using ceramics, one of mans oldest technologies, to inform the present about the past.
All of Ned's production is
individually handmade by him and his assistant Julia
Land
Commissioning
process
Ned Heywood prefers initial contact by telephone to discuss the
project (01291 624836) and subsequently by e-mail for confirmation
of text, draft designs etc. (ned@nedheywood.com). Preliminary
discussions, first draft designs and quotations are normally
provided free of charge.