Conservation & Heritage Issue 52 Summer/Autumn 2026 - Flipbook - Page 31
Each tile is hand-made at the Craven Dunhill Jackfield workshop in Ironbridge using plaster moulds and slip-clay techniques unchanged since the Victorian era
quarried by Haysom Purbeck Stone in Dorset, fixed and
grouted with ARDEX and BAL tiling systems.
millimetres into the body of the tile. It is that depth of inlay,
Cox explains, that gives the tile its exceptional strength and
durability under foot traffic.
Bringing those elements together in a Grade II* listed building
— with no straight walls, a single-skip site compound, and a
live programme of bespoke joinery and wrought ironwork
following close behind — fell to specialist tiling and stone
contractor ABM Tiling, working under main contractor
Simpson of York.
For Salford, the commission went beyond the standard
range. Bespoke coat-of-arms centrepiece panels were designed
specifically for the cathedral, and colourways across the wider
floor were chosen to reflect the tones of the surrounding
stonework and stained glass. The result is a floor that draws
on the building rather than competing with it. “The general
field colour, the stone colour, really matches the finish on the
walls and the natural stonework around the building,” Cox
reflects. “Nothing really jumps out at you — it’s quite muted,
and soft, and just looks a part of the whole building.”
An Unbroken Tradition
The choice of encaustic tiles was not merely aesthetic.
Chris Cox of Craven Dunnill Jackfield — whose workshop
at Ironbridge in Shropshire has been producing handmade
encaustic tiles in the Victorian tradition for generations —
explains why the material is so well suited to a cathedral
environment: “There’s a great tradition of using encaustic
tiles in religious settings, dating right back to the medieval
period, when monks were making inlaid tiles for churches,
cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries. That long tradition
runs from probably around the 12th century through to the
Victorian period, when the great Gothic revival saw these
buildings looking for a tile that was hard-wearing but highly
decorative — part of the decoration of the whole church.”
Stone From The Deep
Alongside the encaustic tiles, large areas of the floor are laid
in contrasting Purbeck limestone: Thornback (a pale tone
with flecks of black shell) and the Grub (blue/grey shade with
an abundance of fossil shells ). Both are quarried on the Isle
of Purbeck in Dorset by Haysom Purbeck Stone, a family-run
business with deep experience of the material’s particular
demands.
The historical precedent mattered to the architects. As Ross
Whittle of Purcell explains, they wanted a natural material
that reflected what would have been used when the cathedral
was built: “We’ve got the large stone columns already, and
they’re on their journey of ageing. We wanted the floor to
start on that same journey — so that as it ages, it does so in
step with everything else in here.”
The tiles themselves are made using a process unchanged in
its essentials since those medieval originals. A plaster mould
is hand-carved; clay is compressed into it to give a relief
pattern; liquid slip clays of contrasting colours are poured
in and around the relief; and once dried, the top surface is
scraped away to reveal the inlaid design — set one to two
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