Traditional Antique Iron Urns

Visit our catalogue to view the range of Iron urns handmade in our london based iron foundry

Our superb range of cast iron urns and jardinières are ideal for use as plant containers and will enhance any garden setting. They are heavy, quality items supplied with a painted finish. To maintain their finish they will need to be re-painted after years of use. If preferred they can be allowed to rust to give a natural rustic appearance.

We also offer urns for holding ashes and many other products.

History of the Urn

Funerary urns (also called cinerary urns) were used by many civilisations. After a person died, survivors cremated the body and collected the ashes in an urn (see also lekythos, a type of pottery in ancient Greece used for holding oil in funerary ritual). In the Bavarian  tradition, a king's heart would be placed in the urn upon his death (as happened with King Otto of Bavaria in 1916). Cremation urns were also commonly used in Anglo Saxon England.

Romans placed the urns in a niche in a collective tomb called a columbarium (literally, dovecote). The interior of a dovecote usually has niches to house doves.

The discovery of a Bronze Age urn burial in Norfolk, England prompted Sir Thomas Browne to carefully describe the antiquities found. He expanded his study to survey burial and funerary customs, ancient and current, and published it as Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial (1658).

An urn is a vase, ordinarily covered and without handles, that usually has a narrowed neck above a footed pedestal. "Knife urns" placed on pedestals flanking a dining-room sideboard  were an English innovation for high-style dining rooms of the late 1760s. They went out of fashion in the following decade, in favour of knife boxes that were placed on the sideboard.

In Classical terms, an urn is a large decorative covered container of wood, metal, pottery, etc. In furniture, it was a large wooden vase-like container which was usually set on a pedestal on either side of a side table. This was the characteristic of Adam designs and also of Hepplewhite's work. Urns were also used as decorative turnings at the cross points of stretchers in 16th and 17th century furniture designs. The urn and the vase were often set on the central pedestal in a "broken" or "swan's" neck pediment.