Will you take a Broseley?

"Will you take a Broseley?" was something which could, apparently, be heard in taverns all over the country in years gone by. The "Broseley" in question being a clay pipe made in the Broseley area of Shropshire. In the early days there were hundreds of individual pipe makers in the town; by the nineteenth century pipe making had become concentrated in three factories which supplied the needs of tobacco smoke inhalers everywhere. One of the factories, William Southorn and Co., has survived and is now a museum of the industry.


Remarkably, when the factory closed in the 1950s, everything was left undisturbed until it was opened as the museum in 1996. It's as if the workers could come back tomorrow and pick up where they left off. There's a mound of unprocessed clay in a corner of the yard; piles of empty cardboard boxes ready to be packed with new pipes; scrawled pencil notes on walls and bits of paper; the moulds and presses ready for action.

We stayed on a former farm in Broseley. The owner told us that there were two coal mines and a clay mine on his land, to which he still owns the mineral rights. The mines didn't survive beyond the 1940s, and locals used to tip their old fridges into the convenient holes in the ground! Something else tipped in large quantities down the bank were the reject pipes from a clay pipe factory. I was shown where to scrape the earth, and, in seconds, I'd uncovered a couple of pipe bowls and a dozen pieces of stem up to about four inches in length. These, unlike the occasional pieces which turn up in the garden, have never been smoked, and so the clay is white throughout.

Totally unconnected (as far as I know) is this house we spotted in Broseley High Street. The one in the middle with the red door. Is this the thinnest house in Britain? I think it was number 55.