Making East London Porcelain

About Making East London Porcelain

Making East London Porcelain is a collaborative science-led heritage project between the V&A Museum and Newham Borough of London, supported by the AHRC’s Capability for Collections Fund. Focusing on the celebrated Bow Porcelain Factory, this project brings communities together to explore Newham Borough as a place of creativity, experimentation and entrepreneurship in the mid-eighteenth century, culminating in an exhibition at Stratford Library.

Together with the Ashmolean Museum and London Borough of Newham, the V&A is investigating London’s first porcelain manufacturers, Bow Porcelain Factory and Chelsea Porcelain Factory. These factories remind us that London was a global centre for experimentation and creativity during the mid-eighteenth century. Making East London Porcelain has been born out of the V&A Research Institute (VARI) research project ‘Experimentation and Placemaking: connecting communities with the technological and innovation histories of London’s early porcelain Manufacturers’ which has been made possible by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Capability for Collections Fund.

Dr Georgia Haseldine, Public Engagement Fellow at the V&A and Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, Curator in Ceramics and Glass 1600-1800 at the V&A describe the project: “Making East London Porcelain seeks to bring communities together to explore Newham Borough as a place of creativity, experimentation and entrepreneurship in the mid-eighteenth century. This project feeds into the wider V&A East project to place making centre stage and to become a sourcebook for us to collaboratively design for a better world. Focusing on the celebrated Bow Porcelain Factory we invite people to experience the urban historical landscape of East London by learning more about its ceramic traditions and thinking about their impact today. Ground-breaking science-led analysis by scientists at the V&A Museum and the Ashmolean Museum will provide inspiration for the next generation of London makers in collaboration with 20 local sixth-form students who will showcase their findings in an exhibition at Stratford Library for Newham Heritage Month this June. Working closely with the students and local teachers, we are exploring how artistic making processes and heritage science can enable us to better understand Newham’s cultural heritage. These wider themes will be explored further in two participatory public workshops working with local artists, where the public are invited to handle Bow porcelain pieces and try their hand at making artworks using historic ceramic recipes.”

The V&A is the world’s leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects that span over 5,000 years of human creativity. The Museum holds many of the UK’s national collections and houses some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewellery, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance.