Mother of village industry
IN 1900, when the Compton Pottery was getting under way, its founder, Mary Seton Watts, wrote to her manager of how well suited terracotta pots were to the ‘present fashion for gardening and garden decoration’. What had started as a piece of philanthropy—recreational classes for villagers inspired by the Home Arts Movement—was soon a flourishing business, selling jardinières, gravestones and sundials ornamented with her own designs. Products were exhibited, won medals and were marketed by Liberty & Co; Gertrude Jekyll would even include miniature Compton pots in the garden she designed for Lutyens’s Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House in 1921.
