Mr. Ambrose Wood, Wholesale Tile Merchant
Regent House, Hanley

"The manufacture of fancy tiles has become of late years and industry of the very first importance in this country, and from all the outward visible signs that we note on every hand there are manifest grounds for believing that the business in question is destined to reach much larger proportions that it has yet assumed.

It would be alien to our purpose and beyond our scope to trace the place of tiles in our ancient decorative systems. We find them on the brightly coloured walls of the Egyptian and Assyrian temples, and they contribute in no small degree to the grandiose pomp of Roman floor ornamentation until the decadence of the latter gave birth to the more bizarre, but often beautiful forms affected by the art workers of the Byzantine period.

But we must direct attention to the achievements of the tile manufacturer in these closing years of the nineteenth century, and in this connection while dealing with the industrial history of Haley one name comes to our mind with special force. We need hardly say that we refer to Mt. Ambrose Wood, of Regent House, a gentleman who has done more than any man in the Potteries district to improve the popular taste in the matter of tiles by devoting artistic energies of a highly cultured order entirely and exclusively into this channel of activity. Mr Ambrose Wood is by training and architect, but twenty years ago he entered upon the business he is now engaged in.

He built the spacious warehouse he occupies, a three-storey building of buff brick, embellished with tiles of very artistic design. Herein will be found an immense stock, embracing all the newest ideas in encaustic plain floor tiles, glazed hearth tiles, dados, walls, and, indeed, every variety known to the trade.

Mr. Wood, besides employing a large staff of workmen at his Hanley warehouse, has also secured the services of a number of experienced tile fixers, many of whom are constantly employed in the English Metropolis alone. Contracts are undertaken in any part of the United Kingdom for the laying of tiles to any extent, and orders are executed with the most exemplary precision and despatch.

Mr. Wood has spared neither effort nor expense to ensure the satisfaction and promote the best interests of his patrons in all parts of the country, and to this spirit of conscientious enterprise and good faith we venture to directly attribute the achievement of that great success which had made his name so popular in connection with the British tile trade."