Qualla: Middleport Pottery

Middleport Pottery: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2010, Middleport Pottery was three weeks from being shut for good. The bottle ovens were derelict, the buildings were structurally unsafe, and the company that had been making Burleigh ware in this factory since 1889 was running out of money. Two of the three buyers interested in the site wanted to demolish it for the land. Then the Prince's Regeneration Trust stepped in, brokered a complicated three-way deal with the ceramics holding company Denby, and committed nine million pounds to restoring the factory and keeping it open. Today the bottle oven is still standing. The presses still run. Burleigh Pottery is the only pottery in England still producing transferware using nineteenth-century copperplate engraving, and they still produce it here, in the same building, using some of the same techniques, in a town that nearly lost both.

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Image: Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Middleport Pottery: What a Model Pottery Looked Like

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ronnie Macdonald from Chelmsford, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. William Leigh and Frederick Rathbone Burgess opened Middleport in 1888 as a deliberate break with what they saw as the chaos of older Staffordshire potteries. The Gladstone Pottery Museum, preserved elsewhere in Stoke, shows the older pattern: a constricted site with kilns and wo...

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Image: Ronnie Macdonald from Chelmsford, United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Middleport Pottery: The Boulton Engine and Charlotte Rhead

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Power for the clay-mixing machinery came from a William Boulton steam engine installed when the factory opened and run continuously until the coal strike of the 1970s. The same boiler that powered the engine heated the building and dried the slip. The engine has now been restored...

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Middleport Pottery: The Years of Risk

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Kidd, CC BY-SA 2.0. The pottery went into bankruptcy in 1999. The Dorlings, William and Rosemary, bought it with the intention of keeping it open, revitalised the inventory with new colours, and were close to making it work when they discovered that their bookkeeper had been embezzling funds and fai...

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Image: Roger Kidd | CC BY-SA 2.0

Middleport Pottery: Burleigh Still

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. What makes Middleport unusual among heritage projects is that the heritage is still working. Burleigh Pottery, owned now by Denby, continues to produce in the factory as a tenant of Re-Form Heritage (which inherited the building when the Prince's Regeneration Trust restructured)....

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Image: Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0