Visitor Centre Mosaics - Westport Lake, Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK.
N 53° 02.885 W 002° 12.826
30U E 552705 N 5877908
A set of three large mosaics located on the outer wall of the visitor centre at Westport Lake, on Westport Lake Road, Tunstall.
Waymark Code: WMZAHJ
Location: West Midlands, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 10/09/2018
Views: 3
The mosaics are series of individual textured tiles created by Phil Hardaker with children and members of the local community.
They are mounted on the wall of the visitor below the bridge to the entrance.
"Westport Lake is located alongside the Trent & Mersey Canal. It is Stoke-on-Trent’s largest expanse of water and consists of two lakes, and a nature reserve. It’s one of the best places in the area for bird-watching and walking. It has come a long way since its initial development as a pleasure resort by a local farmer around 1890 then it descended into a wasteland until becoming one of Stoke's first regeneration projects in 1986. It is now run in partnership between Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and Stoke City Council.
The Visitor Centre boasts a welcoming cafe with panoramic views of the water and it is the perfect place to visit for families, walkers and nature lovers. The lake and surrounding grounds are ideal for a stroll. There is a good, level footpath of around one mile around the lake, and a health walk around the conservation area." SOURCE: (
visit link)
"Philip Hardaker is a - Sculptor, Ceramicist and Moasic Artist
Arts Consultant for Community, Education and Public Arts
Philip Hardaker was born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire in 1954. He attended Harrogate College of Art in 1975 then went on to North Staffordshire Polytechnic to gain a first class honours degree in Fine Art Sculpture. He moved to London in 1977 when he attended the Royal College of Art and gained an M. A in Fine Art Ceramics in 1980. His lecturers included Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake and Lord Queensbury.
Philip moved to Somerset in 1980, renting a studio in Bruton from Dutch painter Henk Huffener.
Since 1985 he has lived in a seventeenth century packhorse inn on the outskirts of Stoke on Trent, working as a sculptor mainly in the public sector and undertaking many educational projects and private commissions.
Hardaker is an accumulator, a shifter of detritus collecting the flotsam and jetsam of our wasteful consumer society and transforming these materials into art. He represents his work as archaeological sculptural paintings made from clay and found objects. For thirty years he has been digging up ancient and modern ceramic shards from Staffordshire and around the world. He employs these fragments of past ages along with his own modelled and cast ceramic elements of heads, animals and aeroplanes in ceramic collages of considerable intricacy and beauty. Hardaker's work has political and ecological objectives and concerns in communicating comment on historical events. The work is also intrinsically linked with being English and celebrating the past production of Staffordshire ceramics and creativity.
The philosophy, ideas and messages behind the work capture the age we live in with both serious intent and irony and a strong sense of humour." SOURCE: (
visit link)