Industry and the wider world

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, almost all bone china was made in Britain, and most of that in a few square miles of Staffordshire.

Why it stayed British

• Materials. Cornish china clay and china stone, and a ready supply of bone ash.
• Skill. Bone china is difficult to shape and fire; the Potteries had generations of people who knew how.
• Secrecy. Body recipes were closely guarded, and the material was hard to copy successfully.
• Market. Continental and Asian factories already made hard-paste porcelain and had little reason to change.

From bottle kilns to tunnel kilns

Bone china was fired for most of its history in coal-fired bottle kilns, loaded with ware packed in fireclay boxes called saggars. Firing was a matter of judgement, and losses could be high. After the Second World War, gas and electric tunnel kilns, with electronic control, gave far more even temperatures. The material was the same; the control was transformed. A few bottle kilns survive as listed buildings, including at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Longton and at Middleport Pottery in Burslem.

A world material

Japanese companies were first to succeed at scale. Noritake records beginning research and production of bone china in 1932; Narumi says it was the first to mass-produce it in Japan, in 1965; Nikko began production in 1978. In Korea, Hankook Chinaware describes itself as the first to introduce bone china technology. In Russia, the Leningrad (now Imperial) porcelain factory developed its own bone china in the Soviet period. India’s first bone china factory, Bengal Potteries, opened in 1964.

From the 1980s and 1990s production grew in Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia, China and elsewhere. China is now reported to be the largest producer by volume. Many historic British brands are today owned by international groups, and much of the bone china sold under British names is made overseas.