Journal
Taking shape – casting the fire table
Earlier this month, Greg, our creative development lead, talked the whole team through how we recreated our latest study, the fire table.
The starting point was a small cast iron hearth table, almost 300 years old, that Matthew discovered in the sheds of an East Anglian auction house. He immediately set his heart on it. A bidding war ensued, but he was determined not to leave without it.
Greg talks the whole team through the technical details of the fire table casting process on a sunny July morning. Matthew provided the historical context.
David of South Lincs Foundry compares the pattern to the original cast iron tabletop.
Instead, every stage was cast directly from the original itself. The legs were divided and moulded in halves, while the top was taken as a direct splash after a hand-built version failed to capture the subtle qualities of its surface. Even the tenon joints, where the legs meet the top, are still made the old way: heated, driven through and hammered over by hand.
From the outset, the aim was never to recreate the table as it would have left the foundry in the 18th century. It was to recreate the object it had become – the pitting, the slight undulations and the peculiar irregularities that three centuries leave behind. A 3D scan would have recorded its shape but lost its character.
Finishers Pete and Gee led the patination, testing solutions more commonly used on brass and developing washes and waxes until the colour felt evolved rather than applied.
Matthew gathered as much of the table's history as he could, but much about its making and the lives it has lived remains unknowable. That mystery is part of its appeal. Rather than recreating an 18th-century object, the fire table is a study of the object that survived.
From the Journal
Taking shape – casting the fire table
