Madeleine Ladell: potter

Everybody has a story. Before lockdown if you wanted to make your own mug or were inspired to try working with clay after watching TV’s Great Pottery Throwdown, you’d have headed to Phoenix Pottery on Caledonian Road, run by Madeleine Ladell. Over the past few strange months Madeleine’s studio has been shut and she has been busy making and sharing bags of clay for home creativity with her clients.  Interview by Nicola Baird. Photos by Kimi Gill. 

It’s a wet Monday morning when Islington Faces first meets Madeleine Ladell who runs Phoenix Pottery under Orkney House at the Bemerton Estate on Cally Road. Offering tea she explains: “I ask everyone to make their own mug, using any method they like – thrown, coiled, slabbed or pinched.” Given her own love of a cuppa – she’s currently drinking Yorkshire tea from a thrown mug with a gorgeous raspberry pink glaze – it seems fitting that making your own mug has become a tradition.

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Then lockdown kicks in. Madeleine’s studio closes temporarily but she keeps busy shaping amazing clay creations. When asked via email in May – seven weeks later – if this strange time reminds her of anything, her answer is revealing. “This time doesn’t remind me of anything personally, partly because there’s never been a time like this when I haven’t had to work. However I keep thinking of moments when plague has swept through Europe (1340s, 1660s) and how Pepys recounts walking home because the watermen are sick, listening to regular updates on the death toll and how he doesn’t visit a barber for 12 months! I cut my hair on Saturday thinking the worst outcome would be I’d look like Henry V but I felt more like Van Gogh after blotting the blood from my ear!”

Back on that wet Monday morning in February there was plenty happening at Phoenix Pottery around the big rectangular wooden table. Madeleine talks to Islington Faces while rebagging lumps of clay, bought from Stoke-on-Trent, so it can be used again. Helper and long-time evening class attendee, Andrew Plaistowe is carefully adding transfers of a favourite shirt pattern on to a group of mugs he intends to give to his family. Nearby John McNair is preparing for the afternoon community pottery class. Then Christine pops by to finish a project. Turns out around 60–80 people visit Phoenix each week.

“I’ve lived in Islington all my adult life,” says Madeleine, who grew up in Bournemouth, Dorset. After finishing a Masters in Music Analysis she got a job in music publishing, editing an academic dictionary of opera. “I needed somewhere to live and there was a room going in a Victorian house with another editor in Archway. I lived there for 28 years until I was evicted in 2018 when the landlord decided to do it up,” she says. Now she lives in a new development on Cally Road as a Peabody Housing Association tenant.

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Places Madeleine Ladell loves in Islington

• Almeida Theatre – I just saw Albion. I teach in the evenings, so went at half term. It was really enjoyable. I like to see pre-Edinburgh shows at the Pleasance on North Road too
• I did a project with older people from the Drover’s Centre on North Road (which has sadly just been closed by the council). They made some beautiful clay pieces, ‘modern fossils’, which were embedded in a flower bed in Caledonian Park near the Clock Tower. Join a tour of Cally Park and the clock tower on Eventbrite
• I like going to the Co-op next door to the studio as the staff are lovely.
• I like the canal, especially Word on the Water, the floating bookshop at King’s Cross.

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Although Madeleine still sings at weekends, her big life change happened after trying pottery workshops in Ormond Road, near Finsbury Park. “Pottery is something that helped when I was feeling depressed. I found it quite stultifying working in offices with the shared space, little partitions and never seeing daylight, and editing felt like I was destroying other people’s work,” she says.

Thankfully Madeleine enrolled on a course at City and Islington College – when it was Hornsey Road – and discovered that she really loved clay, especially working it on the potter’s wheel. “There’s a kind of dance to see how far you can push or tear the clay. Sometimes it’s just right and doughy, at other times too wet. There’s almost another person there when you are working with clay. You’re not on your own. It’s telling you what it wants to do and how far you can press it before it wants to crack. And what you don’t use you reclaim: there’s something so pleasing about that.”

When the college moved to the Centre For Lifelong Learning at Finsbury Park, Madeleine became a technician, then teacher and finally Head of Department. “Our classes were full and thriving, but they closed us down in 2015,” she says sadly.

Madeleine’s City and Islington students – now without a teacher or studio – were to become her first Phoenix Pottery students when she set up the non-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) using her redundancy money. The studio can only fit 12 potters at a time, and when the kiln is fired up the classroom is too hot to use. But with a bit of creative juggling Madeleine is able to offer a range of daytime and evening classes as well as low-cost community classes. “John’s just started teaching an LGBTQ+ class, we call it Rainbow Phoenix, and we’re doing a class for parents and their babies under six months,” she says, adding that if she’s not at the Phoenix studio she can be found teaching evening classes for Westminster Adult Education Service.

“Clay is so healing, mentally and physically,” says Madeleine. “All my classes have a wide range of people and backgrounds. It’s so inclusive – no one thinks there’s a younger person or older person – and it’s a massive antidote to loneliness.”

Tackling loneliness is essential for city dwellers’ mental health, but it’s not easy just going out and doing something. Madeleine feels that when you are working with clay you have an enjoyable creative experience and safe human interaction because, “You’re not facing anyone and don’t have eye contact. You can talk and start to exchange information and then continue friendships outside classes. Watching people grow and come out of their shells is extraordinary,” says Madeleine in her clay-smudged big blue maker’s apron.

Unfortunately, Madeleine again needs to find a new space for her studio as Islington council is due to redevelop the area between her studio and the bus stop for the 17, 91 and 259.  Although Madeleine is open-minded about where Phoenix Pottery relocates, it’s clear that she would prefer to stay in the area. “Cally Road is so diverse and hasn’t been gentrified: there’s a nice feeling and it’s very down to earth,” she says. And she’s got to know many people thanks to her £3 sessions for locals. “Our community sessions, funded partly by the Cripplegate Foundation, are for people who really can’t afford more, rather than students. We have a lot of people attending with disabilities who can’t work because of health problems, and some who are retired: there’s a former puppet-maker, in her late 80s, who joins us.”

Although all groups are mixed ability, many of Madeleine’s students sell their creations at local markets and on Etsy, while Eleanor uses the kiln to fire porcelain brooches that she sells in the Lake District. Madeleine dreams of making abstract sculptures and wall plaques from the clay, but is often busy fulfilling requests for bowls and teapots. “I’ve got to make an American football for my friend in which to bury her husband’s ashes at Highgate Cemetery,” says Madeleine, making a note that she needs to ask if her friend wants it to naturally biodegrade or be fired.

TV’s Great Pottery Throwdown (on More 4 and now in its third series) is currently the Phoenix Pottery’s most talked-about show, but clients also like the chat, the tea and random happenings – Andrew remembers how: “A guy appeared with a more than life-size model of Trump’s head and said ‘would you be able to fire it?’. But he never said what he was doing with it!”

It’s clear the Phoenix Pottery users are passionate about making, but get something extra thanks to Madeleine’s love of teaching with clay. “When you bounce ideas off people everyone grows. When people say what they like about something, they really observe. But pottery-making is also very good for patience at every stage, including the very end,” she says, remembering the woman who made a beautiful salt pig and then when she was leaving knocked it with her jacket and it dropped on the floor, shattering. “One thing you will definitely learn is patience. You wait for the clay to dry. Then wait as it is biscuit fired. Then glaze it. Then it’s glaze fired at a higher temperature – and after all that it may be revolting! And you can’t even open the kiln and check on progress…”

• Phoenix Pottery, Studio 2, Orkney House, 199 Caledonian Road, London N1 0AF offers classes for the community, beginners, experts, LGBTQ+, parent-and-baby and for one-off events. Under 17s must attend with an adult.
• Class info from Madeleine, email: phoenixpotterylondon@gmail.com

Over to you
If you’d like to nominate someone to be interviewed who grew up, lives or works in Islington, or suggest yourself, please let me know, via nicolabaird dot green at gmail dot com. Thank you to Sara for suggesting this interview. If you enjoyed this post you might like to look at the A-Z  index, or search by interviewee’s roles or Meet Islingtonians to find friends, neighbours and inspiration. Thanks for stopping by. Nicola