Tadley Pool

Tadley Health and Fitmess Centre, Hampshire: Pool windows from the outside and the inside.

I returned to Tadley Pool for the first time in 28 years to see if the windows I’d made were still there - the answer was yes and they were looking absolutely great. We were invited in to take photos before the inflatable fun session started (above right) and I thought, as I had at the time, what an odd place it was to have stained glass windows. Because of that and the fact that I’d never had any good photos of them, I’d had a bad opinion of these windows and was now taken aback by how much I liked the design and the colours. The late 1990s was a time when local authorities commissioned art for new public buildings, and it was evidently a good period for my work.

Two windows at Tadley pool 1998. Each 2.6 × 2.9 metres.

The windows were screen printed at Proto Studios which was located in Greenwich at the time, using old fashioned technology. I drew out the designs in black ink, these were photographed and made into screens resulting in a finish where I can recognise my own hand drawn lines. Each window has a different combination of a blue and a yellow with a third colour on the overlaps and a clear white line rather than a sandblasted white one. The screens for the edge panels were flipped for the panel opposite, making this commission one with a very effective use of a smallish budget.

Details of the centre panels

Sunshine through the corners, the clear lines stand out in the transmitted coloured light.

Small watercolour design for the windows.

Back in the studio I found the watercolour designs, tiny but close in feel to the final product. I’m now thinking of how much I can learn from looking back at the way I used to do things before computer technology intervened in the drawing up process and everyone’s work started looking slightly similar.

I also remembered the window I made as part of the same public art project in the nearest infants’ school, Bishopswood. The school colour was red and the theme was trees, as it was for the pool windows. The design was directly from eleven of the children’s drawings and I leaded the window up in the school so that the pupils could see how it was made, and handle (health and safety was also great in those days!) the glass pieces. This was a window that I always really liked, hopefully it’s still there too.

Bishopswood Infants School, Tadley. Window above the entrance doors.

Screen printing

Left, glass panel in the factory before lamination. Right, glass samples in hands, installed glass behind me.

I get large or external commissions screenprinted by protoglassstudios.com . Although they have been making my work since 1992 and have always done a good job, there are so many things to worry about when you hand over the manufacture to somebody else. For this one, commissioned for Alexandra Lodge which is a new development by Churchill Retirement Living in Thornbury, South Gloucestershire, it was the colours. I had the design worked out (described in my blog “Cobbles” in July) and a combination of four opaque colours agreed - you can see the factory sample showing the glass version of these colours in my left hand (above right). In my other hand is a painted sample with an earlier colour palette which ended up being rather similar to the final version.

The colours I use are usually paler, and I would say subtler, than the average. In this case, I was persuaded that the design wouldn’t show up outside and from a distance unless we boosted the colours. Imagine my surprise on visiting the factory after printing but before lamination, to see how dark the colours looked (this stage shown above left) - I was convinced I hadn’t chosen that blue but it was too late to do anything about it other than start again with all three panels. But the same finished panels, as you can see installed on the face of the building below, are somewhere in the middle in terms of the colour range and look just right with the building and the planting scheme.

Left, installation of glass at Alexandra Lodge, Thornbury. Right, official photo showing glass above lounge doors.

I visited the glass factory on one day during manufacture to photograph the process as far as I could. An all out yellow layer had been printed first, this background brightened the whole piece and gave the exposed laminated edges a lovely yellow and purple two tone appearance. On the day, the green cobbles had already been printed and they were doing the blues which went around the edges of some cobbles and cut across the design in flowering branches. The purple layer would be the last to be printed, you can see this stencil on the screen below right and also as the black on the films that we laid on top of the other printed colours in the bottom picture.

Left, panel 2 in front of screen for blue. Right, screen for panel 3 purple.

Left, preparing to print blue on panel 3. Right, panel 3 going through the dryer.

Left, films for screens in the factory. Right, panel 1 with film for purple overlaid.