In Stoke-on-Trent, the boxy, red-brick All Saints Church seems at first an unlikely location for the city’s foremost cultural event. Sitting on a busy stretch of road heading north-east from the city’s train station, the early 20th-century building is imposing but not pretty, surrounded by terraced housing and a community centre characterized by peeling paintwork and boarded-up windows. But from this weekend it will be the main hub of the British Ceramics Biennial, started in 2009 to showcase contemporary ceramics in a city deeply embedded in the history of the medium. “I had driven down this road a gazillion times and hardly noticed the church,” says Clare Wood, artistic director and chief executive of the BCB, which was originally held in the former Stoke-on-Trent factory of Spode – the pottery brand founded in 1770 by Josiah Spode, which went into administration in 2008.
When structural issues were found in the Spode site in 2021, however, the biennial was forced to find an alternative. “But, actually, I think what we have now is rather brilliant,” Wood says of the Arts and Crafts-era space with soaring vaulted ceilings and brass pendant lights, the quarry-tile floor dappled with light from its large windows. A plaque above the organ nods to the city’s once-thriving ceramics industry, honoring local potter George Meakin, who in 1851 founded ceramics manufacturing company J & G Meakin with his brother James. At times during the 18th and 19th centuries, there were as many as 200 factories in “The Potteries” – an area spanning the six towns of Burslem, Hanley, Tunstall, Longton, Fenton and Stoke, which today make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent.
While the erstwhile industrial titans of Wedgwood, Royal Doulton and Spode continue to be top of mind for most when you mention Stoke-on-Trent, the biennial’s vision is broader and often boundary-pushing. It’s an approach that features shapely monochrome vessels by potter Dan Kelly, but also the sculptural combinations of ceramic, wood, metal and video projection by British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam.
It’s not always what visitors – some 21,176 in 2021, on average split roughly half-and-half between locals and those from further afield – are expecting. “Some people are expecting pots,” says Wood, but she highlights this year’s contribution by deaf artist Nina Thomas. “She’s responding to the experience of former deaf workers in the ceramics industry. It’s an animation, but it’s about clay.”
There are outdoor installations, too. “Beyond Repair” by 85-year-old, Cambridgeshire-based potter Elspeth Owen brings together clay elements that will disintegrate during the six weeks of the biennial. And Carrie Reichardt’s tribute to Stoke-on-Trent’s rave culture in the early 1990s – focused on Shelley’s nightclub in Longton, and covering an original 1969 Ford Zephyr in vibrantly hand-painted ceramic tiles – is poised to cause a stir.
Reichardt’s ceramic car is a collaboration with Stoke-on-Trent pottery Duchess China 1888. “I love how willing these firms are when we approach them with slightly mad ideas,” says Wood, highlighting another collaboration between two local artists and manufacturer Johnson Tiles: an exclusive BCB series of tiles with Neil Brownsword, a professor at Staffordshire University, and a project with Jasmine Simpson. Titled “There are Devils in My House”, the latter features a blue-and-white tile mural alongside “grotesque” objects and a “Hellmouth” fireplace, inspired by 16th-century examples modeled to resemble a monstrous gateway to hell.
“My grandparents used to work in the potteries,” says Simpson from her garage studio in Mow Cop, a village on the Staffordshire border. She worked with Johnson Tiles on “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” – the installation by artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper that filled the Tower of London moat with more than 800,000 ceramic poppies in 2014 – and later on her own bespoke tile mural for a London home. “When I’m on the factory floor painting, all the staff are excited about what I’m doing – especially when I mention that I’m a Stokie,” she says.
In recent years, the story of Stoke-on-Trent ceramics has been dominated by decline and job losses. “In terms of the impact of globalization and industrialization, the nadir for Stoke was somewhere between 2005 and 2010,” says Tristram Hunt, director of London’s V&A museum and author of The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain, who served as the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017.
“Having the Ceramics Biennial was just so important creatively, almost spiritually, for the city,” says Hunt. “It was a clarion call to say that the reason that Stoke-on-Trent rose in the mid-18th century was because of design and art, and the importance that Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode and Enoch Booth – all of those great founding figures of The Potteries – placed upon it. You need an ecology of young designers, working for museums and biennials, but also with industry.
Hunt gives the example of Wedgwood – owned by the Fiskars Group since 2015 – as a heritage brand pivoting to partner with leading artists under new creative director Alice Bastin. Her first collaboration this summer was with Scottish fashion designer Charles Jeffrey, founder of the punk-inspired label Loverboy, as part of “a new vision to reinstate Wedgwood as a creative hub for artists”.
The Wedgwood factory in Barlaston is also fostering talent by giving space to tenants 1882 Ltd – the ceramic brand founded by Emily Johnson and her father Chris, fourth and fifth generations of the pot-making Johnson Brothers family, which is creating collections with prominent designers such as Bethan Laura Wood, Max Lamb and Faye Toogood.
Other success stories in the city range from 1851-founded Burleigh Pottery – based in the historic Middleport Pottery site and the only pottery in the world to still do tissue transfer decoration – to relative newcomer Emma Bridgewater, founded in 1985, which employs around 230 people in its Hanley factory, first opened by the Meakin brothers in 1883. Both run tours and have cafes and factory shops.
When Sarah Watson, founder of bathroom furniture and fixtures brand Balineum, began making tiles 10 years ago, she turned to a small factory in Stoke-on-Trent to combine traditional techniques with contemporary patterns. “Tile painter Debra has gone from doing Art Nouveau tulips to semi-naked men in leopard-skin underpants,” laughs Watson, who produces tiles designed by French artist Louis Barthélemy. It’s been a successful strategy: “When we first started we were spending £10,000 a year [on production in Stoke on-Trent], now we spend a quarter of a million.”
The city’s tile-making heritage is also being explored by the BCB with a hands-on workshop space in the community centre next door to All Saints Church. There are other venues too: the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, which hosts an installation by Birmingham-born former fashion designer Osman Yousefzada; and AirSpace gallery, where William Cobbing brings together ceramics and performance, as well as an evening of Potteraoke – described as “the world-renowned pottery/karaoke mash-up”.
One part of the biennial programme is not in Stoke but in the neighbouring town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, where the Brampton Museum is showing work by Brownsword – a former apprentice model-maker at Wedgwood, whose work examines the decline of Stoke-on-Trent’s ceramics industry. The exhibition Obsolescence and Renewal features an archive highlighting “key, but little-known-about contributions to ceramic history from Newcastle-under-Lyme” – alongside new work that plays with traditional and digital technologies.
For the past two decades, Brownsword has been documenting the “transition of the city’s landscape – but not through a lens of ruin porn”, he says. “It could be a world ceramic center of excellence,” he says. “Everything is here: the knowledge base, the historic fabric, the collections and archives. The buildings are unique pieces of industrial architecture, which need to be celebrated. Stoke-on-Trent should be a UNESCO city. It’s got so much potential.”
For visitors, development and investment is in evidence at the Goods Yard – an industrial, canal-side warehouse that was the site of the 2021 BCB and is undergoing a £60mn development to include housing, community spaces and a hotel. But there…
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