All Fired Up

Since teetering on the brink of collapse a decade ago, Burleigh has undergone a remarkable revival of fortunes. Amelia Thorpe visits its Staffordshire premises to learn why its distinctive patterns are again a tea-time favourite.

- Amelia Thorpe

WHEN Messrs Burgess and Leigh joined forces to buy a Staffordshire pottery in 1862, it would have been hard to anticipate that, nearly 170 years later, Burleigh’s front door would one day be festooned with a welcome sign in Korean and Japanese. Nor that fashionable brands would be beating a path to its door to collaborate on dinnerware and stars photographed sipping from its teacups.

Today, Burleigh, founded in 1851, is the only pottery in the world to use traditional underglaze tissue-transfer printing to produce its handcrafted tableware. Its famous blue-and-white china patterns, including Asiatic Pheasants and Calico, are attracting a new (and younger) audience, the order book is full and export sales are up by 50%—hence the multi-lingual signs at the pottery.

Its story of success is all the more remarkable given that the Burslem-based company was on the verge of collapse less than a decade ago. Of course, Burleigh was not alone: the Potteries, home to more than 2,000 kilns in the late 19th century, had been in sharp decline for decades. The demise of formal dining, as well as cheaper imports from the Far East, had brought the industry to a particularly low ebb by the early 21st century.

‘Civic pride had diminished to such a point that people still in the industry were demoralised,’ says commercial director Jim Norman. ‘We seemed to have convinced ourselves that what we did here in Staffordshire wasn’t valuable anymore; that it was better to have mass-produced, characterless products that could be bought cheaply, rather than handcrafted tableware.’