At this very moment, the future of Burgess & Leigh, the beloved maker of Burleigh pottery, is under threat.
As the iconic British brand celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, the company of 65 employees and immeasurable global reach faces uncertainty after its parent company, Denby, filed a notice of intent to appoint administrators, last month. The team is actively exploring options to preserve its storied (and deeply popular) brand, along with a centuries-old printing process that’s now at risk of becoming a lost art.
Known for its quintessentially English transferware patterns, Burleigh is the last surviving pottery — in the world — to use underglaze tissue transfer printing. The technique, developed in the 1750s, involves printing thin sheets of paper using a copper engraving and then transferring that print onto biscuit pottery before pieces are glazed and finished in the kiln. “We use one colour and we get different tones in our decoration by having different depths of engraving. It cannot be replicated digitally,” explains brand and marketing manager — and company historian — Jemma Baskeyfield. Unlike modern imitations, it takes 35 people and nearly 30 steps to produce one piece of Burleighware and no two are exactly alike. It’s a look that has been coveted by discerning clients since the company’s inception. Indeed, Burleigh has been selling pottery to Harrods dating back to the mid-1800s, and more recently counts museums and members clubs among its customers, collaborates with brands like Ralph Lauren and William Morris, and maintains a robust order book of global retail sales.
If you had visited the city of Stoke-on-Trent when the company was founded there in 1851, you would have found yourself among hundreds of factories decorating pottery with underglaze tissue transfer printing. “It was the first method that produced good-quality pottery that replicated hand-painting over and over again,” says Baskeyfield. Today, as the only one that remains, Burleigh does so from inside the historic Middleport Pottery. Described by Re-Form Heritage as the UK’s last working Victorian potbank in continuous production, Burleigh has operated as a tenant in the Grade II*-listed building since 1889.
As with any great company, their secret sauce lies in their team. Tissue transferring is a specialised skill that has been handed down from one generation to the next through Burleigh’s apprenticeship program. In a city where the workforce is rapidly disappearing, and those who are left are aging into retirement, this is especially crucial. “You really have to invest in the future,” says Baskeyfield, noting that one such apprentice, Michael, is the first man to take up the transferring position, so far as her research can tell. “Ceramic making traditionally had male roles and female roles and in transferring, there had never been any men doing it,” she explains, save for a boy who tried it for a few hours in the 1980s and quit. “It’s an exceptionally skilled job,” she says.
In a time when cheap dupes undermine real craft, yet buzzwords like nostalgia and heritage have become woven into the zeitgeist, it simply doesn’t get more authentic than a handcrafted product, being made in a traditional way, in a historic building, using knowledge that has been handed down over generations. “Our primary concern is that, whatever future Burleigh has, it is concentrated on keeping the jobs that are here now, on making the pottery in the same way that we make pottery today, and that we preserve the heritage and continue the story that's been going on for the last 175 years,” says Baskeyfield. “It's the kind of place where you call in to help out for a weekend and end up staying for 25 years. That's what happened to me,” she notes.
Let’s support Burleigh while they look for a new buyer to keep production going, so that this treasured brand, and their legacy of craft making in Stoke-on-Trent, is there for the next generation, too. You can help by spreading the word and following them on social media at @burleighpottery
Images: Courtesy of Burgess & Leigh