Volcano Club Headquarters, Levenshulme / July 3, 2025 by Sasha Ward

Installation day at Volcano Club HQ, glass always looks brighter reflected in the mirror.

A new front door and surround made the installation of this new fanlight an easy job, with pop in plastic beading and two extra pairs of hands to help. The hallway is narrow and we didn’t want to lose much light, so the fanlight is mostly done with transparent enamels and the colours on the vinyl door panels fade off towards the top where they line up with the clear bottom of the fanlight. Of course it doesn’t look clear in the photos as you can always see what’s through the glass and the colours change accordingly. Much of the day was spent waiting for the black and blue cars parked right outside the house to move so I could get a good photo.

Afternoon light and black car through the fanlight and door panels

The design links the windows together with two straight pine trees that peep into the bottom of the fanlight like eyes with sandblasted, therefore very white, brows above them. The colours are the house colours of pink, orange and green with blue for the lake above and to give the illusion of a blue sky when really you are looking at the white inside of the porch.

The textures are just as important as the colours. The rippled side of the glass is on the outside of the door panels, leaving a flat surface to stick the vinyls on to and no need to make any of the colours opaque. The textures on my fanlight glass were so good that I decided to put the decorated side of the glass on surface 4 of the double glazed unit - that is facing in to the interior rather than protected inside the unit (on surface 2) which is the usual practice.

Details from the fanlight: textures made with sandblasting, brushes, rollers and the qualities of the different enamels I used.

In case you’re in doubt, it’s Mount Fuji. There is a selection of Fuji merchadise in the Volcano Club collection, including the crumpled t-shirt, face mask, sweet packet and enamel brooch shown below, next to the hair clip which makes the best use of the distinctive triangle with the white top, which on my glass is clear.

Volcano Club / May 22, 2025 by Sasha Ward

Volcano Club Magazine: Top row, pages from first issue (1995), bottom row, pages from later issues (2010).

I’m making a fanlight window for the founder of Volcano Club, established in 1995 and chiefly known for the zine produced by Augusta Ward at very irregular intervals until 2013. The pages above show the original volcano cover image, some dot to dots (including a pack of cheddars which featured heavily in the first issue) and some very concise instructions for crafting (as we would now call it), for example ‘get rocks and wash’. A later issue celebrated eyjafjallajökull which erupted in 2010 and wrecked the windows of aeroplanes, much like a sandblaster would; inside the zine there was always a wordsearch and a quiz. Augusta also made a stained glass window in 1995 of alternating volcanoes and pyramids, sadly no photo of this exists.

Volcano from a window in St Andrew’s church, Halberton by G Maile and Son, 1931. It is dedicated to Sir Robert Harvey who made his money in South America.

On the hunt for other volcanoes in stained glass I remembered two that I had seen, both made in the 1930s. One was in a Devon church (above) and one was in a huge and fabulous window at Airbus headquarters that I worked on during the restoration of the building in 2013 (below).

Volcano in etched and enamelled glass from the staircase window by Jan Juta, 1936, at the headquarters of the British Airplane Company, now Airbus, in Filton, Bristol.

Design for a fanlight window 2025: Miniature glass sketches, initial design, and full sized final drawing.

Of course we know that the angle of the sides of a volcano should never exceed 45° but sometimes this doesn’t fit in to the format of the picture, for example the vertical zine cover and the window in Devon. This new window (see designs above) is horizontal and the volcano has a more realistic shape that is based on Mount Fuji. It is also influenced by a grid of 48 picturesque views of Vesuvius that we saw in Compton Verney’s 2010 Volcano exhibition, the source of most of my volcanic facts.

Then I remembered a window I made in 2002, a period when I was particularly busy and particularly bad at getting photos of completed commissions in sensitive spaces - this one is in a mental health unit at St James’ Leeds. I just have the tiny and lovely piece of glass for the 1:50 model that I made (below left) and a couple of drawings (below). I rather sneaked the volcano image into the fantasy landscape which was the result of workshops I held with local service users. Amazed that I came up with the same colour combination 23 years later and that I’m still using the same pot of purple enamel, Ferro 77396, which is actually a vibrant and very transparent pink.