Royal Worcester China

We are a part of eBay Affiliate Network, and if you make a purchase through the links on our site we earn affiliate commission.
The roots of Royal Worcester date to 1751, when a group of 14 English businessmen, including Dr. John Wall, William Davis, and Richard and Josiah Holdship, signed a deed of partnership to produce porcelain. This early incarnation of the company...
Continue reading
The roots of Royal Worcester date to 1751, when a group of 14 English businessmen, including Dr. John Wall, William Davis, and Richard and Josiah Holdship, signed a deed of partnership to produce porcelain. This early incarnation of the company didn’t start from the ground up. Most of its know-how, equipment, materials, and workers initially came from an existing porcelain factory in Bristol, which had been housed in a building called Lowdin’s China House in Redcliffe Backs and owned by Benjamin Lund and William Miller. The English were relative latecomers to porcelain. For centuries, China had held the secrets of making what’s called hard-paste porcelain, which used kaolin clay. Because the body and glaze of this “china” ware was made out of the same substance in different stages of decay, the firing process created a hard product that was impervious to liquids and resistant to scratching. Europeans coveted this imported china dinnerware, and struggled to figure out how to make it, creating lower-quality soft-paste porcelain out of various materials. Finally, in the early 18th century, kaolin was discovered in Germany outside Colditz and Aue, allowing factories like those in Dresden and Meissen to make their own hard-paste china. Despite these advances on the continent, British potteries still didn’t have as much access to kaolin, and relied on their own trademark soft-paste porcelain formulas. The porcelain factory in Chelsea combined chalk and lime with ground-up glass; in Bow, soft-paste china was improved with the addition of animal-bone ashes, producing what is known as bone china. The Bristol, and then Worcester, porcelain stood out, however, as perhaps the finest soft-paste china of its time. It was made out of a steatize granite known as soapstone. It seemed to have many of the qualities of hard-paste china, it was finer-grained than other soft-pastes, and its glaze rarely crazed, which is when the surface is broken by fine lines. Much of...
Continue reading

Best of the Web

Ceramics at The V&A
A great reference on ceramics from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Learn about different...
The Bowes Museum: Ceramics
This handsome gallery showcases the top 20 items in the museum's extensive ceramics collection...
Museum of Royal Worcester
The online branch of the museum with the world's largest collection of Worcester porcelain is a...
Thepotteries.org
Steve Birks' super deep site is a tribute to a bygone era, chronicling how a pottery center of...
Newest

Best of the Web

Ceramics at The V&A
A great reference on ceramics from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Learn about different...
The Bowes Museum: Ceramics
This handsome gallery showcases the top 20 items in the museum's extensive ceramics collection...
Museum of Royal Worcester
The online branch of the museum with the world's largest collection of Worcester porcelain is a...
Thepotteries.org
Steve Birks' super deep site is a tribute to a bygone era, chronicling how a pottery center of...