The artist Maggy Howarth, who has died aged 79, once said: “I think I am the only pebble mosaic practitioner in the United Kingdom.” Her creative medium may have been an unusual choice, but despite this – or perhaps because of it – you can see examples of her work throughout the UK, in public places and private gardens.
Part of the charm of her designs lies in their naturalistic themes: she favoured insects, flowers or sea creatures, creating pictures and patterns in coloured pebbles that swirl across pavements and terraces.
Her public commissions include two mosaics for Cavendish Square, in Swindon, Wiltshire; the Green Market and King Street mosaics in Whitehaven, Cumbria; Phoenix Cobbles for Tyne Road East, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear; Bradford City by the Sea for City Park, Bradford, West Yorkshire, and Compass Pebble Mosaic in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
There are two in Dorset – one at the Square in Bournemouth and the other at the Square in Swanage. Howarth also worked on the memorial fountain at Dunblane cemetery, Stirling, which commemorates the schoolchildren killed in the mass shooting in 1996.
One of the largest of her works, at eight metres square, is the pebble mosaic at the Centre, a shopping mall in Livingston, made to mark the 50th anniversary of the Scottish new town in 2012.
Maggy was born in Warrington, Cheshire, the daughter of Annie (nee Joyce) and George Hogg, and studied fine art at Reading University from 1962 until 1966. She married Boris Howarth, a folk singer, later an artist and theatre director, in 1966, and with Adrian Mitchell, then poet in residence at Lancaster University, they founded the Lancaster Street theatre.
The Howarths subsequently joined the Welfare State International theatre company, an artists’ collective that staged outdoor spectaculars in Britain and around the world, and it was while working on an outdoor installation for WSI at Conishead Priory, a Buddhist retreat on the Cumbrian coast, in the late 1970s that Maggy was first inspired to create pebble mosaics. Soon she founded Cobblestone Designs, based at the family home near Wennington in Lancashire, which would go on to become the Maggy Howarth Studios.
Her first public commission came from Lancaster city council in 1988. They wanted a large pebble mosaic pavement representing the red rose of Lancaster at the Ashton Memorial, built to commemorate Jessie, the second wife of James Williamson, the first Lord Ashton, who made his money from another kind of flooring: linoleum.
It was a community project and Howarth was offered a team of job creation scheme candidates, who had to do a test piece before being selected to take part. One of these was Mark Currie, who has worked for Maggy Howarth Studios ever since.
In the early days of the studio, Howarth and Currie would source their pebbles by hand, from beaches in Scotland and the Isle of Man. “We would wander along with a couple of buckets each,” said Currie, “and pick the stones from down by the shoreline, where the stones were wet and we could see the colours clearly.” Although they always had a licence, this became more difficult over the years because of environmental concerns – “I think the authorities were worried we were going to turn up with a couple of JCBs” – and the studio now orders stones from around the world.
The garden designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd, who has several examples of Howarth’s work in her garden at Gresgarth Hall, Cumbria, remembers her as “a tall woman with very definite opinions, who was absolutely delightful”. Rather than the ancient methods of building mosaics on site that might have been used for Roman floors or Byzantine works of art, after discussing designs with a client, Howarth would make the mosaics in her workshop using a pre-cast technique that she pioneered.
Lennox-Boyd recalls: She had this extraordinary method of working, creating the patterns upside down in boxes and then setting them in concrete. These would then be brought to the garden and positioned in the paving, which would have been cut to make the space.”
One of the Gresgarth Hall designs – a salmon – is in a pond, and you catch a glimpse of it through the water. Another design features a curving border representing the Milky Way, with four zodiac signs representing members of the Lennox-Boyd family at each corner.
As time went on, Howarth focused increasingly on designing with clients rather than the hard physical labour of creating the mosaics, and she retired in 2020 at the time of the Covid lockdown.
After Boris’s death in 2009, their son, George, joined the business to help run the studio. He survives her, and is currently installing pebble mosaics at Balmoral and Sandringham commissioned by King Charles.
• Maggy Howarth, mosaic artist, born 6 August 1944; died 15 July 2024
• This article was amended on 28 August 2024 to make it clear that the family name of the linoleum manufacturer who became Lord Ashton was Williamson.
