Teak Bowl

A bowl in reclaimed teak, turned from timber sourced through Ian Pope. The blank came from a teak door salvaged from a local power station - a grand old piece of industrial infrastructure given a new life on the lathe.

While quite dark, the grain patterns are fascinating - tight, interlocking lines that hint at decades of slow growth in a tropical forest, long before this timber found its way into a power station on the Thames. There is something satisfying about seeing material like this reborn rather than ending up in a skip.

That door came from Tilbury Power Station, a coal-fired giant that stood on the north bank of the Thames in Essex, just across the water from Kent. For more than half a century its bulk and towering chimneys were a landmark of the estuary - the later station generated electricity from the late 1960s until 2013, latterly burning wood pellets in place of coal. It was demolished in stages over the following years, the last of it brought down in 2019 and the site cleared to make way for a new port. The building is gone, but its teak lives on: timber that travelled from a tropical forest to a power station door to, at last, a bowl.

At just a fraction under eight inches across and two inches tall, it sits comfortably in the hand. The melamine lacquer brings out the depth of the grain without adding any artificial sheen.