Reading Museum - Town Hall - Aldermaston ACS

Took some pictures today. Posting them here rather than the Aldermaston thread.

This is the main website
http://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/

About Us Page:
http://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/aboutus/

Find Us:
http://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/findus-map/

Reading Museum
The Town Hall
Blagrave Street
Reading
Berkshire
RG1 1QH

Opening Times

Reading Museum

Admission Free
Tuesday to Saturday: 10am - 4pm
Sunday: 11am - 4pm

There is more but my fingers are getting tired posting all the images!

Wow. makes my sad collection look like a car boot stall!

would you say it was worth the journey...when I phoned a couple of months ago they didn't have much idea

"Alan Caiger-Smith is one of the finest British potters with an international reputation as an artist and lustreware expert. He is a local man who returned to Berkshire in 1955 to set up a collaborative pottery at Aldermaston producing domestic wares. The pottery finally closed in 2006.

Caiger-Smith trained as a painter and always thought that decoration was an integral part of any pot, a belief that was highly unfashionable in the early days of the pottery. The Aldermaston potters spent much time experimenting with clays, tin-glazes, pigments and firing techniques. This led to the building of a unique wood-fired kiln, which in turn enabled the pottery to master reduction-fired lustre - a remarkably difficult and unpredictable tin-glaze technique that had long been ignored in Britain.

From the 1960s Reading Museum collected Aldermaston pottery, and in 1999 it was given an extraordinary lustreware collection by David Castillejo, a major patron of Caiger-Smith. The potter subsequently gave the Museum a range of non-lustre pots from his own collection and the Reading Foundation for Art and the Friends of Reading Museums acquired further complementary pieces. These contemporary pots complement the Museum’s other ceramic collections, such as the important early tin-glaze earthenware in the Blatch and Tufnell Collections which inspired Alan Caiger-Smith as a boy.

You can see a range of Caiger-Smith's work in the Museum's Atirum gallery."

http://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/collections/art/aldermaston-pottery/

If you are in Reading then it's OK. Don't make a big detour. To be honest there were other things that I was looking at in the Museum and the Painting of ACS was more captivating than anything else. The collection is badly displayed. I would have preferred one large plain cabinet instead of all these ones at deterrent heights. The painting is great but it's hidden behind the lift and it should be in front of the lift as you come out for maximum impact, or at least on a main vista.

You will have the room to yourself, no one give a hoot about some old pots.

To be honest the Boars head from the Boars Head pub got my attention. It closed in 2004. I was shocked to see the head up close - a thing from the past.