Decorative Cast-Iron Work In Wales

Out Of Print ... Written in both Welsh and English! The remarkable achievements of the foundries are often forgotten in the present plastic age. Many great founders were remembered for the casting of cannon and industrial artifacts, but there were many others who catered for the Victorian love of decoration The Great Exhibition of 1851 provided the stimulus for bigger and better decorative cast ironwork, and the output of the foundries reached its peak in the late Victorian period. Catalogues were made available for customers to choose from a variety of designs for numerous purposes street-fittings, as well as church fittings; and gates and railings. Then there were fountain canopies, railway stations and seaside piers, porches and porticos, as well as street canopies, all constructed of decorative pre-fabricated parts. This book enumerates the types of examples which still remain in Wales in the hope that we will become more aware of this important part of our heritage, and make every effort to conserve what remains. It also traces the history of the types of patterns used and demonstrates that the designs have an ancestry which relates back through Cottingham and Shaw to Nash and Adam, and they in turn to the designs of the Romnans, the Greeks and the Egyptians.