Qualla: Leach Pottery

Leach Pottery: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JamesJen, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1920, two men in their thirties arrived at a converted cow shed on the edge of St Ives carrying tools, sketches, and an idea that no English potter had taken seriously before. The shorter of the two, Shoji Hamada, was a 25-year-old graduate of Tokyo's Higher Technical School. The Englishman with him, Bernard Leach, was 33 and had spent the previous eleven years living in Japan, where he had apprenticed under the Sixth Kenzan to learn raku and stoneware in a tradition reaching back to the seventeenth century. What they built on that hillside above Stennack would be the first Japanese-style climbing kiln in the western world, and the cradle of British studio pottery. A century later it is still firing.

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Image: JamesJen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Leach Pottery: A Friendship Forged in Tokyo

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mutney, CC BY 4.0. Leach, born in Hong Kong to a colonial judge, had returned to Japan in 1909 to teach etching. There he met the philosopher Soetsu Yanagi, the painter Tomimoto Kenkichi, and the young Shoji Hamada. Over a decade in Tokyo and Kyoto, Leach apprenticed in Japanese ceramic traditions ...

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Image: Mutney | CC BY 4.0

Leach Pottery: Matsubayashi Builds the Kiln

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mutney, CC BY 4.0. Their first climbing kiln was an early failure - the draft was wrong, temperatures uneven. In 1922 Leach wrote to Japan for help, and the master kiln-builder Tsuronosuke Matsubayashi sailed to Cornwall. Matsubayashi, from a family that had built kilns at Asahi-yaki for generation...

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Image: Mutney | CC BY 4.0

Leach Pottery: The Workshop That Trained a Generation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Theroadislong Leach Pottery soup bowl Courtesy of Bernard Leach (St Ives) Trust Ltd, CC BY-SA 3.0. Leach's son David trained at North Staffordshire Technical College and took over management in 1937, abandoning earthenware in favour of a new stoneware body suited to local materials. The pottery's apprentice tradition drew makers from around the world. Michael Cardew came as an...

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Image: Theroadislong Leach Pottery soup bowl Courtesy of Bernard Leach (St Ives) Trust Ltd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Leach Pottery: Standard Ware

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1946, in the lean post-war years, the pottery launched a range called Standard Ware: mugs, jugs, bowls, plates, all designed to be domestic, affordable, beautiful in the unfussy way Leach believed honest workmanship should be. Three glazes only - celadon green, tenmoku black, ...

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Image: Andrew Abbott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Leach Pottery: Restoration and Working Life

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mutney, CC BY 4.0. By the 1990s the pottery had fallen into decline. The buildings were in poor repair, the kiln cold, the apprentice tradition lapsed. Between 2005 and 2008 a £1.7 million restoration, led by the newly formed Bernard Leach (St Ives) Trust, conserved the original buildings, restored...

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Image: Mutney | CC BY 4.0