Wedgwood was a British status symbol but now you can’t even give it away

“No ta, love. I won’t be able to shift that,” said the bloke behind the counter at Battlesbridge Antiques Centre when I asked if he’d buy my late aunt’s 1970s Wedgwood “Clementine” dinner service. I got the same answer from all five of my local charity shops when I tried to give it away. “Those sets take up too much shelf space and they don’t sell,” shrugged the kindly woman in Barnardo’s. “Hardly anybody uses that stuff any more. It won’t go in the microwave or dishwasher will it? You could try eBay, though?”

I looked online at the pieces of Clementine languishing on the auction site for between £5 and £30 – no bids – then glumly down at the box of hardly used crockery that had spent decades in the family sideboard. A wedding present too “precious” for daily use, saved for rare guest visits and Christmas dinners. The patterned, floral style was too fussy for my tastes and I wasn’t sure it would survive the dishwasher. The pieces also felt too delicate for my hectic household, which is bustle-full of clumsy teenagers and an even clumsier dog who counter-surfs for leftovers whenever my back is turned.

On my community Facebook group I saw the local scout leader asking for unwanted kitchenware for a “charity crockery smash” event, at which visitors could pay 20p for the therapeutic release of shattering a plate on the floor of the village hall. After all those years of being “too good” for use, the family Wedgwood appeared to be good for nothing but its own destruction.

A sad fate for what was, until quite recently, Britain’s most prestigious porcelain. Founded in 1759 by Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery’s elegant tableware has long been a status symbol, used in Britain’s royal households from 1765 onwards as well as around the world: in the White House, the Vatican and the Kremlin.

But in recent years Wedgwood has been in serious decline. In 2009 the collapse of the Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton group pushed it to the edge of closure.

In 2015, it was purchased by the Finnish consumer goods company Fiskars, producing “prestige” wares (hand-painted and limited-edition objects) and jasperware at its factory in Barlaston, Staffordshire, while the rest of the company’s output was made in Indonesia. The company reported a pre-tax profit of £11.5m in 2022 but a loss of £1.4m in 2023. This downturn was accompanied by a decrease in turnover from £33.7m to £29.5m.

Last week, Fiskars revealed plans to halt production at Barlaston for up to 90 days from the end of September, putting 70 workers on temporary leave. Britain’s pottery and ceramics industry has been hard hit by rising costs and energy bills in recent years, with a number of firms recently collapsing, including nearly-200 year old company Royal Stafford in February. Moorcroft Pottery, which collapsed in April, reopened its factory this month after being rescued by its founder’s grandson.

“This year is the 250th anniversary of Wedgwood’s famous, blue ‘jasperware’,” says Robin Emmerson, Wedgwood expert and former curator of decorative arts at National Museums Liverpool. “I’ve just written a book on it which I can’t sell to a publisher because the stuff is so out of fashion.” he laughs. “With the exception of a few top pieces, competed for crazily by the super rich with their capricious tastes, all Wedgwood and all similar old tableware is plummeting in price.”

The lack of interest reflects modern lifestyles, he says. “Look at the prices of dining tables. I was at an auction house a few weeks ago. They were selling an elm-wood dining table from around 1870. Solid as a rock, with drop-in leaves. Probably weighed several tons. They couldn’t get £100 for it. Twenty years ago that would have been a £5,000 table.

“That’s where we are. People are not doing dinner parties.” He points out that even Charles Saatchi, former husband of TV chef Nigella Lawson, preferred to take friends out to restaurants, disappointing the Domestic Goddess, who wanted to throw more dinner parties at home.

Wandering round the huge Battlesbridge Antiques Village, I see very few dinner services. “Interestingly, the only sets I make money on are the more decorative, working-class, bone china sets [from the mid 20th-century]: your Shelley Potteries, Susie Cooper and Clarice Cliff pieces,” says Simon Poynton, who runs The Age of Decodence. “The upper-class stuff was less decorative, more plain, because it was used on the tables, and nobody really wants to use it anymore. They say a cup of tea tastes better from a proper cup and saucer, but most of us use mugs.”

Sarah Haywood, who plans weddings and events for ultra high net worth individuals, says that her clients rent, rather than buy, high-end crockery. “Modern more than the traditional stuff. I wouldn’t say they go for Wedgwood much. They like Ginori, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana. But clients are more interested in ‘tablescaping’ than just the crockery. It’s all about layering tactile textiles, curating flowers, foliage and lighting, adding colour and height to add definition to a table to tell an individual story.”

She says that dinner services have totally dropped off the gift lists at weddings. “We don’t see that anymore. The original wedding lists were pioneered by the General Trading Company in the 1920s and they went out of business in 2008. People don’t have the storage space and most couples live together before they get married now. They’ve already curated their homes and they go out for large gatherings.”

This reality is reflected by my friends. One, who married in the 1980s, jokes that her Ginori set has been smashed in 40 years of rows (actually the dishwasher did for it) while another says that her Debenhams Denby has long outlived her marriage. Another keeps the Royal Doulton which she was given at her wedding in 1972, but laments the limited opportunity to use all 12 place settings. One boasts of picking up “masses of Wedgwood Flying Cloud from eBay for a bargain price” and relishes the luxury of good porcelain, another resents the possibility of being lumbered with her grandparents’ “fancy-puke-bucket”-style soup tureen.

Many of us, it seems, are stuck in crockery limbo, like flies in that soup. South Africa-born Caroline Speed, 65, recalls that her first memory of arriving in England in 1965 was dinner at her aunt’s farmhouse in Kent. “We were greeted with a roast dinner all served on Wedgwood with big, solid-silver cutlery. She had a massive collection lining the dining-room walls in glass dressers.

“It was all very imposing for a five-year-old who preferred to be sitting naked in the sunshine eating a foraged pear. I still have one of her plates, sadly broken, that I don’t have the heart to throw away.”

A few people tell me they love their inherited dinner services, and make a hobby of scouring charity shops to find spares. Rachel King cherishes her grandmother’s Royal Albert Lavender Rose set, while Jai Breitnauer finds her parents’ 1979 Denby Sahara far more durable than the Ikea “crap” it replaced (a woman after my own heart as I also use vintage Denby stoneware). But when Susan Grossman tried to sell the Limoges service her parents brought back from France 55 years ago, she found that the postage ended up being more than the price offered.

Jane Miller, 49, from London, says that, like me, she was heartbroken to find that she couldn’t sell or donate a 1960s Wedgwood Tiger Lily Service. “Neither my brother nor I had space for it,” she says. “But I did cart the box home to my two-bedroom flat, where I live on my own, for a few weeks to think about what to do with it and come to terms with the fact the possessions my parents strived to collect and then held so dear were actually worth very little to anyone now except us.”

After a few months, Miller decided to give some of the tea cups to a friend, who made candle votives from the tea cups. “The rest I took to the recycling centre,” she says. “It was undoubtedly one of the hardest and most unexpected parts of grieving my parents.”

Emmerson says that “you never know” what will come back into fashion. I think of all the boxes of vinyl records I gave away 20 years ago. Now they’d make me a mint on eBay. So should I put the Clementine dinner service away in the loft and wait for prices to rise from the ashes? “You could do that,” says Emmerson. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath!”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]