Figure 1  Excavated nineteenth-century oven base from Thomas Minton’s chinaworks. Scales are 0.5, 1.0, and/or 2.3 m. (All photos, The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent.) Figure 2  Mid- to late-nineteenth-century oven base from George Jones’s Trent Potteries. Note the central void. Figure 3  Detail of central void, showing fill of brick, sandy material, and pottery waste: Sandeman’s “cork.” Figure 4  Another oven from the Trent Potteries, once again showing the central void.