LIVING THE DREAM
EMILY TAYLOR MEETS THE COUPLE BEHIND BRIDGEWATER POTTERY, AT HOME IN THEIR NORTH NORFOLK RECTORY.
Emma Bridgewater was on the school run when I arrived at her rectory in North Norfolk on a sunny August afternoon. Her husband Matthew Rice, just disappearing through a gateway with a wheelbarrow, suggested that I walk around the garden for quarter of an hour and then we could meet over a cup of tea.
I opened a wrought iron gate and found a walled garden with soft apricot coloured brick supporting espaliered peaches, plums and pears, a wooden greenhouse bursting with Italian tomatoes, peppers and tiny aubergines, and neat wooden-edged beds of vegetables and cutting flowers: enough pink- and white-flecked Zinnias, Cosmos and Agapanthus to keep a small florist supplied all summer.
At the end of a double row of young pear trees a hole in the wall revealed a whitewashed outdoor dining room with fireplace, chimney stack and a reclaimed Victorian window, through which a dozen sheep in every colour from black through chocolate, beige and cream (with spots) to white, could be seen grazing in a paddock.
"When i started there was a terrible gap in the market. British companies were hell bent on producing formal dinners services and tea sets and the only alternatives were rustic earthenware from Portugal and Italy."
Passing among the friendly sheep I opened a wicket gate and, crossing a cherry orchard beneath which a peahen was loudly clacking at her three pea-babies, I found Emma and Matthew having tea in a white-painted veranda at the front of the house. On the table were a collection of mugs whose bold sponge-ware designs have grown Emma's business from a one woman band - designing, decorating and delivering her pottery from a friend's flat in Chelsea 20 years ago - to a company employing over 100 staff in offices in London, a large Victorian factory in Staffordshire and their Dundas Street shop in Edinburgh.
Emma Bridgewater was always sure that her business would prosper.Her publisher father instilled in her a confidence that has propelled her through the vicissitudes that beset every company as it grows. "What matters is the design," says Emma. "When I started there was a terrible gap in the market. British companies were hell bent on producing formal dinners services and tea sets and the only alternatives were rustic earthenware from Portugal and Italy."
Bridgewater's generous shapes echoing traditional English kitchen china have since been decorated in dozens of patterns. Sponge-ware was a technique popular in Stoke-on-Trent and the Scottish potteries in Glasgow and Kirkaldy from the nineteenth century until the end of the 1950s. But with increased mechanisation it passed from use, and when Emma suggested reviving this labour intensive process she was considered crazy. But she persevered, and there are now twenty decorators hand printing her distinctive potato-print-like designs in the Emma Bridgewater factory.
Bridgewaterhas resisted the move towards what is euphemisticallycalled outsourcing. All the large companies now make a large proportion of their pots in low-wage economies like China or India, but Emma prefers having a factory close to home - although she clocks up a horrifying mileage each year between Norfolk, London and Stoke.
"I couldn't do any of this without Matt," says Emma of her husband, designer Matthew Rice, whose hand is in many of their creations. "Emma can think and I can draw," adds Matthew, "which is lucky as drawing is something I can do here in Norfolk while Emma is away. I can also do the school runs."
The Bridgewaters' large, light studio is an old stable where shelves of samples and reference books vie for space with paper designing projects, the couple having recently diversified into textiles and wrapping paper.
Inside, the house has a lived-in look. Life centres round the kitchen and a solid ash table designed by Matthew (before marrying Emma he worked with David Linley producing furniture). A dresser groans with china. "Matthew says we should have the latest designs," complains Emma, "but old favourites keep slipping in."
At the other end of the room a second dresser is covered with 19th century pottery - meat plates, bowls, jugs and dishes - and everywhere are big jugs filled with flowers from the garden.
I ask Emma if they ever have anybody else's china. "We had some white Wedgwood bone china plates for a wedding present, most of which have now gone the way of all plates," she says. "Matthew has bought two sets of hand painted Delft-type plates from Isis Ceramics in Oxford but apart from that we use our own as we like them best."
A long hall with white painted wooden floor and hung with brightly coloured framed French schoolroom maps from the 1950s leads to the drawing room, dominated by a black grand piano inherited from Matthew's grandparents. More shelves of pottery, antique Staffordshire figures, coronation mugs and plates line the walls, and surround a simply hideous 1970 giant television that works only intermittently. Upstairs books and china complete the shelf space, while Matthew's dressing room is lined with a museum's worth of stuffed birds.
The house is low on design statements and entirely lacking in state of the art technological equipment. The 1952 Aga is supplemented by a brown and cream 1970s gas stove, but there is a feeling that the house works.
Emma opened her first shop 15 years ago in the Fulham Road when she and Matthew lived practically next door. Since then shops have opened in Marylebone, Stoke and Edinburgh. Bridgewater has over 400 outlets around Britain but it is in their own shops that the full range is visible.
Norfolkis not an obvious place to live for Emma, Matthew and their four children, Elizabeth, Kitty, Margaret and Michael, but it is one they love. "My childhood summer holidays were spent on the coast here and my granny, great aunt and loads of cousins live here, so it was the first place I wanted to move to when we left London ten years ago. The shock of moving was wonderful. We had two years of what in retrospect feels like one long summer holiday, with family and friends staying all the time and the sheer pleasure of getting to know Norfolk more thoroughly. Matthew threw himself into village and church life and developed the garden he had longed for in London."
A decade later they are in a different stage - schools, teenagers and a pleasurable but always increasing workload - so now their house is a vital and welcome retreat. "Two hours into the journey back I think we must be crazy to be living in Norfolk, but when I park the car, get out and see coal black sky and stars I remember why I love it here," Emma says.
BRIDGEWATER POTTERY
739 Fulham Road, London 020 7371 5264
28a Dundas Street, Edinburgh 0131 556 9781
81a Marylebone High Street, London, 020 7486 6897
Lichfield Street, Hanley, Stoke on Trent, 01782 201 328
www.emmabridgewater.co.uk
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