I went on a tour today with the Omega Group of Emma Bridgewater’s factory in Hanley. Bought sixteen years ago at a time when all the traditional potteries were closing (they had wholly failed to adjust to changing tastes, continuing to produce porcelain long after people had stopped buying it), the factory was originally built for the Meakin Brothers (J&G Meakin), which had been established in 1851 to supply the American trade with cheap ironstone ware. It opened in 1882. It’s now, once again, a big operation, employing 250 people in all the various stages of production, highly systematised as in the nineteenth century, men doing the mould making and shapes, women the highly skilled transfer and sponge decoration. The design work is done by Emma herself and Matthew Rice, her husband and managing director, then translated in order to be reproducible.
This is the entrance to the factory:-
This was a bowl celebrating the centenary of Meakins:-
This was the first long room:-
This was one of the workers and his equipment:-
I liked the ghostly feet of the man who made the moulds:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Emma Bridgewater and her husband Matthew Rice show, triumphantly, that, with attention to the quality of Design (and good marketing), manufacturing today can be successful. They have built this company from, literally, a single cup and saucer, to its present position, employing 250 people and selling all over the world.
When Emma Bridgewater’s company began, from a standing start, to be a great commercial success she was courted by every town that made ceramics with offers of sites, cheap capital etc, (Derby, Worcester, London etc) but she turned them all down on the basis that it was on the skills, enthusiasm and loyalty of workers in Stoke that she and Matthew had built the company and she would remain loyal to them.