WORKSHOP

glyn@heritageleadplanters.co.uk

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Welcome to our workshop. This is where we turn recycled lead into high-end lead planters and cisterns, practical art you can use in your garden. Heritage Lead Planters is a small, friendly artisan foundry with a team of craftsmen, complete with workshop dog, dedicated to creating the very best garden ornamentation we can.

We design and make all our own patterns. We don’t copy other foundries work and we don’t take casts of copies. This means we excel at creating a rich and crisply detailed first-generation casting surface that you won’t find elsewhere. And being artists ourselves, we are always making new designs, always looking to create something different that pushes the boundaries of ornamental art. We enjoy the thrill of bringing a new pattern to life, from a thumbnail sketch in a notebook to a finished piece of lead that we showcase on this website

These unique wooden patterns are then used to make sand moulds for the lead, a traditional labour-intensive technique that has to be repeated for every panel. Nothing is mass-produced, this is just old fashioned craftsmanship at work.

Above you can watch the process of pouring lead and how the sand mould is destroyed when the lead panel is withdrawn. This intimate process means that each panel, indeed each planter is unique. These are pieces of art, and any flaws in the casting are simply the creative process making its presence known. Of course, we fettle out the majority of these flaws, but always choose to leave some in to make your planter unique.

For larger panels we simply use more craftsmen to pour the molten lead.

A limited stock of planters are available to buy ‘off the shelf’ for immediate dispatch, but generally all of our planters are made to order. We will hand cast a planter specifically for you. The pattern comes out of the storeroom for you, the lead is melted for you, our time creating the planter is spent working for you.

We then carry out the processes of welding, fettling and finishing by hand. We create a product we are so proud of, a product we want to see enhancing the look of your personal Eden, enhancing the quality of time spent in your garden.

We take this time over our creations because we know they will still be doing their job many centuries from now. Our foundry-cast lead planters are designed to last for many generations, and will be worth far more in twenty years than what you paid for it. To quote Alan Titchmarsh when writing about lead planters “They are expensive, but they will last forever and the children can send them to Sotheby’s when I’m gone.”