I'm raising £25,000 to replace or repair the main woodfired kiln at Oxford Kilns. Over the past ten years, we’ve fired this kiln almost 80 times, alongside more than 4,000 potters. Together, we’ve made over 22,000 woodfired pots — each one shaped by flame, ash, effort, and time.

Now the kiln is wearing out and beginning to falling down from a decade of intensive use by so many teams. It's already operating far beyond its expected lifespan. And if we can’t rebuild it, the workhorse of the project, then one of the only places of its kind in the UK will come to an end.

This has never been a commercial venture. It’s not part of a business or a gallery. It’s a working, woodfiring kiln built to be shared — by students, professionals, hobbyists, and anyone else serious about clay. Everyone who uses it profits from it. It exists because people care enough to give their time, their energy, and their trust to make it work.

And now I’m asking for money — not from one donor, but from many. Because that’s the only way to keep this place true to what it is.

What Will the Money Fund?

We’re rebuilding the kiln from the ground up — not just to replace what’s broken, but to build better.

The new anagama will be designed and constructed by Claude Aussage — master kiln builder and regular visitor to Oxford Kilns — drawing directly on our ten years of firing experience on this site and his lifetime of designing and building kilns, it will reflect everything we’ve learned: how the kiln draws, how it burns, what the pots become.

This new kiln will be: accessible and robust, designed for shared, frequent community use. It will be fine-tuned to produce the rich surfaces and flashing effects our potters have come to expect, more environmentally responsible, with improved fuel efficiency and firing control. The new kiln will be easier to load and fire, for both newcomers and long-term users. Built to last, using the best materials and carefully designed for longevity, the new kiln will allow us to continue to work together as woodfirers.

Your donation directly supports the materials, labour, bricks, insulation, flue structures, chimney, and firebox — the literal infrastructure of the next stage of woodfiring at Oxford Kilns.

This isn’t just a rebuild. It’s a step forward: toward a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient future for woodfiring in the UK.

Woodfiring is hard work. It’s slow, unpredictable, and physically demanding. But the results — the surfaces, the colours, the pots — are like nothing else. If you’ve ever held a piece of real woodfired pottery, you’ll know what I mean.

If you think that matters — that this kind of space should exist — then please help us rebuild it. Every contribution, large or small, helps lay the foundation for the next chapter. And if we don’t do it, it won’t happen. It’s as simple as that.

🔥 Let’s keep the fire burning.

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