For nearly two decades, Christopher Bailey was synonymous with Burberry. He took one of Britain’s most recognizable heritage brands and made it feel entirely of its time. So there is something both surprising and strangely fitting about his latest chapter: a 175-year-old pottery in Stoke-on-Trent.
Bailey wasn’t actually looking for a pottery. He had been away from the corporate world since leaving Burberry in 2018, spending time with his family and considering what, if anything, might tempt him back. Then, earlier this year, a friend mentioned that Denby had gone into insolvency. The news didn’t register much at first. Then he realized Burleigh was part of it.
He knew the pottery, but a visit to Middleport changed the equation. Here was a company still making everything in the Victorian factory it has occupied since 1889, with machinery, molds and methods handed down through generations. More importantly, the knowledge of how to use them was still there too. Bailey and a small group of investors acquired Burleigh in June, keeping the factory running and its 62 employees at work.
Burleigh has, it turns out, become rather good at surviving.
Founded in 1851 as Burgess & Leigh, the company moved in 1889 to Middleport Pottery on the banks of the Trent and Mersey Canal. The factory was designed so that every stage of production, from raw clay to finished ware, could happen under one roof, and it remains a rare surviving example of a Victorian model pottery.
Its history has hardly been without drama. The Dorling family stepped in to rescue the company in 1999, and Denby acquired it in 2010, when Burleigh was again in difficulty. The following year the factory itself was sold to the Prince’s Regeneration Trust, which carried out a £9 million restoration and kept Burleigh on as tenant. The buildings now belong to the Stoke heritage charity Re-Form Heritage, and the pottery has never stopped working.
And working is the operative word. Middleport is no carefully preserved museum of industrial nostalgia. Its shelves hold thousands of molds, copper rollers engraved with patterns, and machinery that has been in use for longer than most of us can imagine. Burleigh’s archive includes some 25,000 molds and 5,000 copper engravings, a record of changing British taste. Bailey is eager to digitize the collection, not least because finding a particular shape or vessel can be an adventure in itself. He told Hamish Bowles in British Vogue that he could spend two days searching for a single piece.
But what matters most about Burleigh is not what it has kept. It is what it still knows how to do.
Transfer decoration itself is hardly unusual. What sets Burleigh apart is its continued use of the traditional underglaze tissue-transfer process, a method that has largely disappeared from commercial pottery production.
Patterns are engraved onto copper rollers, inked and printed onto exceptionally thin tissue paper. The tissue is then cut and painstakingly applied by hand to each piece before being washed away, leaving the pattern behind beneath the glaze.
Imagine trying to wallpaper a teapot with wet Kleenex.
It takes considerable dexterity, particularly when a flat piece of printed tissue has to be persuaded around a handle, across a curve or neatly onto the inside of a bowl. A complicated piece may require numerous separately cut sections, all of which must meet precisely.
And not all the expertise is visible. Shirley, who has worked at Burleigh for decades, can detect a flaw simply by tapping one piece of pottery against another and listening to the sound. She knows when the sound isn’t right — when air has been trapped inside. It is knowledge acquired through years of experience, the sort that is difficult to quantify and harder still to replace.
The patterns themselves are, naturally, part of Burleigh’s appeal. Blue Calico, Asiatic Pheasants and other familiar designs have graced tables for generations, their intricate decoration as much at home in a contemporary kitchen as in an English country house.
Collaborations with Ralph Lauren, below, and, more recently, Carole Bamford’s Daylesford have introduced Burleigh’s patterns and methods to new audiences. Both are natural partners for a pottery whose appeal lies as much in the way its wares are made as in how they look on the table.
But keeping a historic pattern in production is not the same as keeping alive the knowledge of how it was made. The first is relatively straightforward. The second depends on people who have spent years, sometimes decades, learning things that cannot easily be taught, automated or even adequately explained. We tend to think of craftsmanship in terms of the finished object: the decorated surface, the slight irregularities that betray the hand. The real achievement is harder to see. It is the judgment acquired through repetition, the understanding of materials, the ability to recognize when something is right — or, as Shirley demonstrates, to hear when something has gone wrong.
The Heritage Crafts Red List now classifies industrial pottery as critically endangered in Britain. It is a striking designation for a country whose ceramics once furnished tables around the world, and whose industrial and artistic history is so intimately bound up with places like Stoke-on-Trent. Once that kind of knowledge disappears, it rarely comes back.
Lulu Lytle recognized the same danger when she learned that Britain’s last remaining rattan workshop was facing closure. Rather than lose its machinery and specialist skills, she brought the operation into Soane Britain. What began with two craftsmen in Leicester has grown to nineteen, with apprenticeships helping to train the next generation. It’s a compelling example of how preserving traditional craftsmanship needn’t mean preserving it in aspic. With the right investment and imagination, it can flourish.
For Christopher Bailey, the challenge at Burleigh is not to revive a forgotten name or rediscover a neglected pattern. It is to ensure that the people who hold this knowledge have a future, and that there will be another generation to learn from them.
You can always revive a pattern. The hands that made it are another matter.
