A potter for our times
The Radical Potter
Tristram Hunt (Allen Lane, £25)
WHEN perusing this attractively packaged biography of ceramics impresario Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), your reviewer was prompted to recall one of the few joyous moments of lockdown, Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throw Down (GPTD): a show that reveals with infectious passion the myriad elements of the potter’s alchemical craft, through which lumpen forms are turned into, say, a dazzling Art Deco punchbowl set that, crucially, didn’t leak. As The Guardian’s Tim Dowling put it: ‘If your pot doesn’t make the judge cry, you aren’t trying hard enough.’
It is perhaps too fanciful to imagine judge Keith Brymer Jones’s spiritual ancestor shedding tears of joy over a tea cup, yet the Wedgwood described in this splendid book understood well the agonies and ecstasies inherent in the pursuit of a perfect balance between form and function. The stated purpose of was filmed at Middleport Pottery near Burslem—Wedgwood’s birthplace and ancestral home—since 1910 one of the six towns that form the city of Stokeon-Trent. The region traces its commercial ceramics production back to the 13th century.
