The Story of Clay Ceramics: A Fragile History

No art form tells us more about our ordinary lives than ceramics.

For hundreds of years, some of the finest objects made on these shores

have been formed from clay.

Ceramics are where function meets art.

They can be beautiful...

..grotesque...

..useful...

..surprising.

But they speak of our lives, our habits, our tastes,

in ways that painting and sculpture cannot.

Ceramics are something that you take an extraordinary material,

this soft, uniform, malleable material which is clay,

and then, by what must have seemed a miracle,

and is, after all, a kind of miracle,

suddenly, you can make it permanent.

It's the thrill of creation.

This series will reveal the hidden story of British pottery,

from its humblest origins to the present day.

It will bring alive the age of Josiah Wedgwood

and the men and women who placed Stoke on Trent at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

And it will place centre-stage the potters who reacted against the factories,

and found, in studio pottery,

a modern art form in which Britain was to lead the world.

But this first episode will look at the early days of domestic pottery.

It will show the materials and techniques

that allowed a peasant craft to become a versatile art.

And it will uncover the innovations that enabled Britain

to finally emerge as a world leader in ceramic production.

Ceramics are absolutely about what makes us human.

They are part of the way in which we articulate our life,

from birth to death.

Nothing is more primal than clay.

It is where all pots begin.

This is the Melbur Pit in Cornwall.

Clay like this has been used by potters for thousands of years.

Clay is...

the cheapest, commonest,

dirtiest, most basic material.

It is very sexual stuff, because it's gloopy and slithery,

and, of course, it becomes warm to the touch

as you press it and mould it.

It makes me feel very humble

that I can take the earth and actually make a vessel from it.

Working with clay is that you...

..you are God.

You are God.

The art of pottery is almost as old as we are.

'The craft of the potter really began long before the dawn of history,

'when villages were unknown, and agriculture scarcely thought of.'

'Primitive women in many lands began to shape clay into pots.'

One of the earliest techniques for building a pot was by squeezing,

squashing and coiling sausages of clay into a smooth, even wall.

But right from the start,

there was a desire to make pots more than merely functional.

People have made pots and used pots and eaten off pots for millennia,

and the making of beautiful pots is a deep human desire

to make the most ordinary things in your life beautiful.

That desire stretches back more than 5,000 years in Britain.

This shard of Neolithic pottery may not look much,

but it tells an extraordinary tale of the innate human urge to decorate.

This a piece of pottery which has been in our collection

since the eve of the First World War.

It was dredged out of the River Thames,

and brought via an antiquities dealer in Wandsworth,

and has sat in our collections ever since.

When our conservator came to look at the pits in the neck here,

which were then full of fluff when they came to her,

and began to remove the fluff,

she then realised that these impressions might take a cast.

So, using a dental mounting medium, she took a very neat cast,

and when that had dried and it was taken out,

what we were left with was the tip of a finger,

with a very long, potentially manicured fingernail.

Now, I think our general view of people in prehistory

is that their fingernails were likely to have been bitten to the quick,

or torn to pieces by hard manual labour.

Well, here was a person whose fingernails were not that way.

They were very carefully maintained, you could almost say manicured.

And one thinks, perhaps, say, of a modern guitarist,

who grows fingernails to enable them to pluck the strings.

Well, this person may well have grown their fingernails

specifically to enable them to decorate the pot in this fashion.

There was a possibility of finding fingerprints actually on the wall of the pot,

so we got in contact with Wood Street Police,

and they sent one of their fingerprint officers over,

who took some impressions of his own, and did indeed turn up some fingerprint impressions.

So it's a very nice way of identifying the manufacturer of this pot.

So we are on the hunt now for other similar fingerprints,

to see if we can match any more vessels to this particular potter.

'Thousands of years roll by.'

'Some unknown genius has adapted a new invention, the cartwheel, to form a potter's wheel.'

'This revolutionary achievement meant better vessels than ever before,

'and news of the potter's wheel spread like fire through the ancient world.

The moment wheel-throwing comes in,

then the arduous, very laborious rotation of the wrist

suddenly is transformed, and you can create objects,

cylindrical, globular, almost of infinite size.

A lump of worked, moist clay is thrown down on the wheel or bat.

With applied pressure from the hands, the lump is made even,

and moved to the centre of the wheel.

Then the thumb makes a central hole, which becomes the pot,

with the sides growing up around it.

When complete, the potter cuts the pot from the bat with a cheesewire,

and leaves it to dry.

The pot would then be fired in a kiln to strengthen the clay,

and then sometimes fired again, bearing a decorative glaze.

It's a slow, painstaking process.

Until the late sixteenth century,

most pots in Britain were made like this,

from reddish clay, and known as earthenware.

The results were both sturdy and practical.

Medieval English pottery, unkindly, has been characterised as "brown".

And that does sort of sum it up.

To our modern eyes, when we are flooded with colour,

everywhere around us we have colour,

but in the medieval world, things were brown-ish.

And with the exception of green and blotches of blackish-brown,

those are the colour ranges for medieval pottery.

But at the end of the sixteenth century, all that was to change.

And it all began with hatred.

Religious persecution in Holland and Germany

meant that Protestants fled their homeland in fear of their lives.

Many settled in Britain, and brought with them their trades,

including pottery.

These recently arrived European potters brought with them

a technique that would see British pottery

burst into life. What had been a craft was transformed overnight

into an art.

Pots were no longer green and brown,

but alive with imagery and decoration.

And it came to be known as English Delftware,

after the Dutch town of Delft,

a famous centre of production for this kind of pottery.

John Hudson is a potter in Yorkshire

who makes wares in traditional styles, including English Delftware.

This is a low solubility lead glaze,

with 8% tin oxide in it.

The essence of Delftware is that you take

an otherwise transparent lead glaze, but into it you put ashes of tin.

And when the glaze is fired, it becomes opaque.

In other words, it gives you a more or less white canvas,

-onto which you can paint.

-Ready for decoration.

So all those medieval people who had got used to browns and yellows

and greens, suddenly they had white pottery

which could be decorated with a limited colour range.

Typically blue... what we call blue and white,

but other colours began to come into the palate.

Now, what you're actually doing with this

is painting onto a powdered surface.

Now, I'm going to need to put some concentric bands

of cobalt blue around the plate. So we need to set the wheel going,

and get the plate running as truly as possible.

You have to wet the cobalt first of all, by taking a little bit

of water on a sponge, squeezing it into the cobalt.

Cobalt is a very, very, strong colorant.

So it's very much like watercolours.

Now plates and pots could be decorated,

the question was, what to paint on them.

There you are with a whole colour range,

a palate that you never had before,

and of course, what you want to do is paint portraits of notable people.

The most notable ones being the monarchs.

That's the plate finished.

The earliest known piece of English Delftware

with an English inscription may not depict a king or queen,

but it is a royal commemorative.

This is a piece dated 1600 or 1602.

And it talks about the roses are red, the leaves are green,

God save the Queen Elizabeth.

And it's a view of

the Tower of London.

So we're seeing a royal souvenir

from right at the very beginning of the industry in this country.

And on the back,

we have this fine tin-glaze as well.

But also, you can just see,

in the footring, there's two holes. So this was made as a display piece,

this would have been hung on the wall, and rather curiously,

whoever painted it didn't really pay as much attention

to where the holes were. And if had ever hung on the wall,

it would have hung slightly skew.

The extraordinary significance of this piece is, basically,

it is the first royal souvenir.

The 17th century was one of immense political upheaval.

Civil War tore the nation in two.

And in this world of bloody division,

English Delftware would play a central role

in the battle for hearts and minds.

England was a grim place, generally speaking, in the 17th century.

I mean, nobody can overstate

just how appalling it became during the parliamentary wars.

So that when you see the Restoration of the Stuarts with Charles II,

you see a huge explosion and a sigh of relief expressed in the pottery.

You get these wonderful commemorative wares with portraits of

"Long Live Charles II" and they're wonderful portraits.

They're quite naive, they're almost cartoonish.

You're really saying, "Thank Goodness, the Kings are back!"

It might have begun with cups and plates,

but soon, more idiosyncratic objects were being produced.

This English Delftware ceramic plaque

depicts Charles II in a tree, bearing the crowns of England,

Scotland and Ireland in its branches.

It's framed within a section

of oak bark, and refers to a very particular event in 1651.

Charles II, when he's a very young man,

attempted with the help of the Scots Army to reclaim the throne.

And they were eventually surrounded by Cromwell's forces at Worcester,

and slaughtered in the streets.

Charles did escape,

and one of the places that he sheltered

was in an oak tree in the woods in Boscobel,

near Boscobel Manor, where they had taken him in.

When the Restoration came about in 1660,

the Boscobel Oak immediately became a symbol of, as it were,

the King protected by his people.

It's like a folk tale - the monarch in disguise, all sorts of things.

And there were paintings of the Boscobel Oak,

and there were prints of it, pictures of him in the oak tree.

So it's absolutely right that there should also be a ceramic plaque.

English Delftware was principally an urban form of pottery,

made in cities such as London, Bristol and Liverpool.

But the more traditional pottery of the countryside was also to reach

its golden age in the 17th century.

Called slipware, it was coarse earthenware,

decorated with different coloured liquid clay, known as slip.

It was usually shades of brown,

but it had an earthy beauty all of its own.

Like English Delftware, slipware was also used for commemoration.

But rather than just royals,

it's more often the lives of ordinary Britons we see celebrated.

You often see historical ceramics with inscriptions on them.

Often they'll refer to the birth of child,

let's say a slip decorated cradle,

and you could ask yourself the question, why?

Why is it important to commemorate people through ceramic objects?

I think one reason might be that

a ceramics object is fixed in time.

So a silver object, you can reshape, just heat it and hammer it again.

You can unpick weaving, or re-embroider it.

But a ceramics object, as any conservator knows,

is really difficult to mess with. Once it's fired, it is what it is.

A fired ceramic marks its place in time

in a way that's very unusual, and I think quite poetic in some sense.

It's interesting that ceramics are used as commemorative things.

I suppose it's because

the amount of space where you can hang things in a normal house

is quite limited. Something that you can put on a shelf,

which doesn't take too much space, is a nice thing to have,

so you commemorate going to the seaside on your holiday

by the little mug that you buy.

Equally, you commemorate the moments in your own history.

That's what ceramics are very good at.

The greatest slipware maker of all

was a Staffordshire potter named Thomas Toft.

The 30 or so pieces of his pieces we have,

dating from the 1660s through to the 1680s,

display an eccentric playfulness.

Thomas Toft, perhaps the most significant name

when it comes to these huge slipware chargers,

his name appearing boldly in the bottom quadrant of the dish.

Dishes typically 18-20 inches in diameter, thickly potted,

maybe half an inch thick at the rim,

in the centre, decorated possibly with a royal portrait

or the coat of arms of the royal family. And then around the rim,

we have a cross hatch design, done in different colours of slip.

Those colours may be dark brown, chocolate brown, pale cream,

so you get a real depth of colour

within a limited brownish-yellowy palate.

But these huge things survived

in a way that many of the contemporary everyday wares didn't.

Thanks to their survival, potters today are still moved

by the unpretentious talents of Thomas Toft.

I remember going to Stoke-on-Trent and picking up a Thomas Toft dish,

and I could feel where he'd picked it up

when it was still wet and done things with it.

A lot of the later pottery is so beautiful and so perfect,

it sits there with a smile like the Mona Lisa,

whereas the pottery made for peasants or country people

or ordinary working-class people,

it's like listening to Billy Connolly or Peter Kay, you know,

they're full of wit and full of life.

And they appeal to me far more

than the finer wares of Wedgwood or Meissen.

I like looking at the slipwares, and the ones with the hand marks in,

and the ones which are a little bit skew-whiff. Wonderful.

Mary Wondrausch works in the tradition of Thomas Toft

at her pottery in Surrey.

She mostly makes commemorative plates, using slipware.

The 17th century became

my greatest area of interest,

because that's when the English slipware was at its best.

Still a formidable potter at 88,

Mary first throws the plate on her wheel,

using a reddish clay.

Then, after covering it in a layer of slip,

she fires it for the first time,

before decorating it in a manner Thomas Toft himself would recognise.

For the detail, Mary uses a device she designed herself,

made out of a bicycle inner tube.

It's a very crude tool,

particularly for doing faces.

You really have to simplify.

It's rather like a painting -

I try to do a balance of the colour,

do you see, over the whole body of the plate.

Mary has regular customers going back many years

who've commemorated all the major events in their family

through her slipware.

It's great for me dealing with families,

and they all say it's become part of the family story.

That's the thing about pottery, isn't it,

that it's still going to be there,

really, it will be passed down, those plates.

But it's difficult with divorces - who shall keep the plate?

I've heard some...

pretty strong...

stories about that.

Ooh, that's better.

Both English Delftware and slipware had transformed British pottery

by offering surfaces that could be beautifully decorated.

As a body, though, the earthenware

they were made of had major drawbacks.

It chipped easily and it was porous,

meaning while it looked nice on a wall,

it was far from ideal for everyday use.

One last major breakthrough would improve on this, and in doing so,

would confirm the 1600s as the century

when British pottery came of age.

That breakthrough was a body known as stoneware.

And like English Delftware,

it was a technique imported from the Continent.

As the name suggest, stoneware is very hard.

Not only will it hold water, but it will resist knocks,

and you will see it used by the great wine exporters of the Low Countries.

So we associate the early stonewares in Europe particularly with Germany.

Bottles in sort of balloon shapes,

sometimes with moulded designs,

a bearded motif,

these come over to England from the Rhine.

As with all things

coming to England, eventually we get around to making these things ourselves.

And most notable of all the stoneware makers in London is John Dwight.

John Dwight would come to be regarded by many as the father of modern British ceramics.

He was no rural artisan, but an Oxford graduate with a scientific bent.

And in the 1670s, he set himself the task of cracking the mystery of stoneware.

John Dwight had been...

well, he was a venture capitalist, an alchemist and a chemist.

He worked with Robert Boyle and Hooke, and then he decided to experiment in ceramics,

and set up his pottery at Fulham,

where he could blaze away with his kilns to his heart's content.

The Fulham Pottery, founded in 1672,

would remain in production for nearly 300 years on the same site,

though all that remains today is this single bottle kiln.

It was in Fulham that after years of experimenting, Dwight mastered the technique of making stoneware.

Almost indestructible and watertight,

at last, British pottery would have a form

that was practical and long-lasting.

If this was all John Dwight had done, he would still have gone down

as one of the most influential potters in our history.

But a private tragedy would inspire him to create two of the most moving works in the story of British art.

John Dwight's daughter, Lydia, was six years old when she died on 3rd March 1674.

These white stoneware sculptures of his dead daughter,

one on her deathbed,

the other raised to life again,

would be a private work for John Dwight, not intended for public display.

I think those two sculptures of Lydia Dwight are easily

the most moving objects in the history of British ceramics.

Those objects are not just about

a private loss, they are not just about one person's grief.

I think they speak to anyone who has lost a loved one of any age.

They are so emblematic and they are so simple.

She's not a famous person, she's not a king,

she's not a warrior, she's not even an actor,

she's just a six-year-old girl

and there's something so poignant about her typicality...

in some way, the ceramic expression of grief that John Dwight is making there

is a beautiful poem in clay to this dead girl.

The 17th century had seen British pottery catch up with its European rivals.

In the following century, it would come to lead the world.

And the inspiration was tea,

a new arrival from China that would captivate us as a nation.

Tea has many advantages.

It allows you the excuse to go shopping

to get a tea set, the sugar base,

sugar tongs, silver kettle, the cups,

everything. And this shows off how rich and tasteful you are

and it facilitates this new form of social occasion, new form of intimacy,

inviting friends to your house in your drawing room

to enjoy tea and gossip together,

so it has quite a feminine quality to it.

You often see caricatures of woman enjoying a tea party in the 18th century.

and there's a sense that they are like a coven of witches taking over the world

and the men are somehow excluded and this is somehow a bad thing.

Just as alluring as tea were the porcelain cups and saucers it was drunk from.

Porcelain from China had been arriving in Europe since the 16th century.

It was highly coveted for its delicacy and translucency.

It's a very simple formula.

Chinese porcelain is made of two things,

china clay and china stone.

And they occur together in certain parts of China,

notably in the area around the city of Jingdezhen.

And that is where porcelain has been produced for over a thousand years.

With demand high, British potters were looking for

ingenious ways to compete with the allure of Chinese porcelain.

One of my favourite pieces is a six-lobed tray of Delftware.

And inside, you see a panel

containing a scene, an interior of four people drawing up chairs,

to have a cup of tea, with sash windows in the background,

a little pug dog in the foreground barking, as the manservant comes in to fill the teapot with water.

And when you look at the table, where the lady sits waiting to pour her tea,

you'll see all the tea wares are placed on a little hexagonal tray,

just like the hexagonal tray on which the whole scene is painted.

It's just a delicious, little object.

And it takes us into a Georgian drawing room in the late afternoon,

in a way that no swanky painting can do.

But the star of the tea party was the teapot,

the ultimate symbol of conviviality and sisterhood.

The teapot today is part of a housewife's standard equipment.

Yet, once tea was only a society drink, and the teapot a rare and beautiful work of art.

I think that the teapot becomes increasingly important as a symbol of the female head of the household,

the mistress of the household.

You know, today, you say, "Shall I be mother?"

It means, pouring the tea, it becomes the symbol of solid, in-control, comfortable femininity.

And it offers brilliant opportunities

for colour and decoration, and the expression of different styles.

There's more frivolity in teapot-making than you can believe in any ceramic practise.

It's almost like the ludicrousness of trying to pour something made out of clay

allows people to go into wilder, wilder elements of whimsy.

Inspired by 18th-century ceramics,

Carol McNicoll has been making unconventional teapots and domestic ware for nearly 40 years.

We went to the V&A

and I saw wonderful frilly teapots made out of lace,

that was actual lace dipped in clay,

and I just thought that whole tradition of...

over-the-top table ware...

..was completely wonderful and that's what I fell in love with.

I love the idea of things being used.

I love the fact that if you use something,

you look at it, and it changes.

If it's a vase you put flowers in it and it looks one way,

and if you don't have flowers then it looks something different.

I just love that you can make a special teapot

and it has this whole history of...

afternoon tea, tea as a ritual,

tea having been - when it first arrived here - this incredibly expensive luxury thing

and then becoming very everyday.

For me, the home is...

the most challenging environment. If you can make something

that can survive in the home,

then you've done something wonderful,

because the home is...isn't a church

that's designed for the showing of objects.

It's a place that people live in. And if you can make an object that sings in the home,

then you've created a small miracle.

The 18th century may have seen the birth of our love affair with tea,

but it also had less sophisticated heroes.

In the 1780s, a small miracle of British domestic pottery turned up for the first time.

The Toby Jug quickly made himself at home

in the national psyche.

Love him or loathe him, Toby was here to stay.

The literary origins of the term "Toby" are unclear.

Could be Toby Philpot, a notorious tippler from Yorkshire.

Some people think there is a reference to Sir Toby Belch from Twelfth Night,

who was also quite famous for drinking.

I don't know which is the answer, and I don't think we ever will.

By now, of course, as we get into the 20th century,

Staffordshire potters have discovered that people like

collecting, they wanted to complete a series. There is a missing one,

"I have to get Henry Sanden."

When I first worked here, we did a lot of the old Toby Jugs

as people recognised the Toby Jug.

My favourite one's the Squire.

We don't do these now.

They're out of production.

So the old ones were the same as the very old ones, and I think they were good characters.

Much more modern now.

Adrian Chiles, he'd make a good Toby Jug.

Yes, he's got lots of character in his face.

Collecting Toby Jugs is a curiously British obsession.

Ron Earl saw his first jug in 1950.

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair.

What makes a good Toby jug is really in the eye of the beholder.

I can possibly show you a jug that I think

is absolutely fantastic and beautiful and I wouldn't part with it

for the world, and you might think, "Yuck, that's the ugliest jug I've ever seen".

The reason I started collecting Toby jugs was really the thought of the history behind that jug.

If you'd had a brain and eyes,

what it would have seen and experienced.

Whenever I have visitors and friends round,

they always make a bee line to look at my Toby Jug collection

but most say, "Aren't they ugly, how do you keep those in your house?"

And I have to go into some lengthy dialogue

to try and explain to them.

Unfortunately, there's no member of my family who is particularly interested in Toby jugs,

I have two cats who show a passing interest

but as for any other member of the family

there is no interest, whatsoever.

My daughter's not the slightest bit interested,

which is rather a shame because one day she'll inherit them.

But if the Toby Jug is an acquired taste,

the dinner service is something that no smart home was without.

And, like tea ware, the rise of the dinner service began in the 18th century.

In the medieval and Tudor period, dinner is in the middle of the day.

And in the 18th century, we get a change because of the Industrial Revolution, really.

People are leaving their homes to go out to work somewhere else,

in a factory, in an office, they can't eat in the middle of the day.

So breakfast becomes more important, and so does dinner at the end of the day, too.

So it becomes more formal, it becomes more of a performance, there's artificial lighting involved,

and that's why, for example, ceramics, dinner services,

have gold rims around the edges of the plates, so that that will sparkle and glitter in candlelight.

Two British innovations transformed the dinner service.

One was a new ceramic material to rival Chinese imports,

perfected by Staffordshire master-potter Josiah Spode.

By 1794, he and his partner, William Copeland, were in full production with the wonderful bone china,

which is still, for all practical purposes, the nearest approach to the pure porcelain of the Orient.

The refinement of bone china by Josiah Spode would revolutionise British domestic pottery.

Made of china clay, china stone and ground animal bone,

bone china was a brilliant alternative to porcelain,

being translucent and delicate, yet tough.

You don't really mean tough, do you?

I certainly do mean tough.

And I'll demonstrate it.

The other innovation concerned what went ON the dinner service.

Transfer printing freed British manufacturers from

the laborious process of having to hand-paint every individual plate.

The same intricate design could be copied again and again...

..and again.

One pattern in particular has come to epitomise the British dinner service.

But if you look beyond its blue and white idyll,

the story of the Willow pattern is not what you'd expect.

It's a pattern that every household somewhere must have an example of, in this country.

The story has it that a young couple are prevented from marrying, but they go ahead, anyway.

The irate father, or father-in-law, decides to chase them from where they're living.

They chase them across the bridge, three little men running to chase

them across the bridge, they escape to an island, then they take a boat

over to the distant island, where eventually, the father-in-law catches them up, and torches their house.

They die, and they fly off,

as a pair of birds, and the birds are in the top of the design.

Well, I'd love to tell you that that was a well-known Chinese story.

Actually, it's basically a Staffordshire invention.

Regardless of its authenticity,

the willow pattern quickly became part of our cultural heritage.

Artist Paul Scott plays on this heritage

in his contemporary take on the classic blue and white design.

I live in rural Cumbria

and my friends and neighbours

were profoundly affected by the foot and mouth crisis.

At the time to travel out of the village where I live,

you would either have to travel past rotting piles of sheep

or burning pyres of cows.

And I found, one of the things that ceramics does very well

is that it commemorates events.

You know, we have Royal Wedding plates,

we commemorate anniversaries, and things like that.

And it seemed appropriate to me that we should remember this time,

and so I did a series of pieces about the foot and mouth crisis.

One of the most overt ones, or in your face ones,

was the piece I made with the burning cows.

This was an image that we would see every night on the television...

..and it seemed to me that these were like dancing feet,

they were like dancers.

So this is a bone china plate.

The plate itself is actually made out of calcined ox bone, burnt ox bone.

And it could also be seen as a carving platter for a roast beef,

and so it seemed natural to me to put on these dancing cows,

burning cows, to remind us of what happened on that time.

I didn't intend it to be controversial - I did it because

it seemed an appropriate way to record a period in time

of things that were happening in the English countryside.

This wasn't the countryside of the rural idyll,

this was the English countryside in 2003 or whenever,

and this is what you saw and this is what you smelt.

Somebody once said to me,

"Why do you use ceramics to work with? It's a dead medium."

Well, the reaction to this plate proved to me that actually,

this wasn't a dead medium,

that actually it's very much a live medium.

And that fact is that we may not produced blue and white plates in England any more,

but actually they are part of a cultural wallpaper in our heads.

We're all familiar with them,

we understand them - or we think we understand them.

And so therefore,

putting something like this on a plate really upset people.

If food and drink had been the inspiration behind 18th century pottery,

it was the problem of sanitation that would define the breakthroughs of the 19th century.

Following the Industrial Revolution,

Britain's manufacturing cities were fast becoming uninhabitable.

The pottery industry was part of that explosion of people and grime.

Now it would have to be part of the solution.

In 1842, the social reformer Edwin Chadwick

published his report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population,

which called for better public health,

particularly in relation to sewage and water.

One potter believed he had the answer.

Henry Doulton's family firm

is best known today for its dinner services and figurines.

But back in the mid-19th century,

Doulton realised the stoneware his factory produced in abundance

was the perfect material for the carrying of both waste and drinking water.

In 1859, his moment arrived.

Along comes a highly skilled engineer,

a man called Joseph Bazalgette.

He creates plans for putting a modern drainage system into London.

The London and Victoria Embankments are created,

and who provides the sanitation pipes?

Henry Doulton.

Thanks to Bazalgette's vision and Doulton's ceramic pipes,

London's sewage was put underground.

Soon, diseases such as cholera began to disappear from Britain's cities...

..to be replaced by the ceramic water closet.

What had once been a household embarrassment

was rapidly becoming a work of art.

Firms such as Twyfords and Doultons

vied to produce the most attractive water closets,

either hand painted or using elaborate transfer printing.

The heyday of the WC was when Tommy Twyford

incorporated the whole lot in one piece,

he made the bowl, the trap and he fitted them both within a pedestal.

The pedestal was then easy to decorate,

to make it acceptable to the lady of the house

and the public generally.

And this is when it started to take off.

Manufacturers, having developed the technical side and perfected the efficiency of the closets,

now had a beautiful canvas on which to work and decorate

and they went from the sublime to ridiculous.

Some were just plain white, some were decorated with transfers.

The transfers were of flowers, of roses, of birds,

of plants growing up the front of the bowl,

and in fact some were even decorated with hand-gilding.

It was gold, hand-enamelling so you got beautiful blues and reds,

and this really started to be appreciated

by the Victorian householders, to say, this is a thing of beauty.

I've been on my hands and knees in so many loos to look at the name badge on the back to see who's made it,

and think, well, you've done a good job there, or this is a lousy closet, or it leaks.

In 1851, the first flushing public toilets

had been unveiled at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London.

They were the work of engineer George Jennings,

and proved an immediate success.

Over 800,000 visitors paid to use them,

giving rise to the expression, "to spend a penny".

Beneath a chapel in London survives a Gentleman's Convenience fitted out by George Jennings,

now kept pristine by its proud caretaker.

The thing with cleaning these toilets is that it's an enjoyable job

because you have this history around,

and it is a pleasure to come down and clean them because of what they are.

It's not just about cleaning toilets,

it's about keeping something going for future generations so they can

appreciate the Victoriana about the place.

The toilets have survived a long time because they've been looked after

and not harshly treated, and cleaned with some thought.

I am thrilled to clean them and see them every day.

After people have been down here and seen these toilets they come

back smiling and really thrilled that they've actually been down here,

which is unusual for toilets, but there we are.

Not only are they functional toilets, but they are works of art.

The Victorian concern with sanitation

had become an all-consuming obsession.

This is the refreshment room

of the Victoria & Albert museum.

When opened in 1870, it signalled a new era in our public dining habits.

Clad floor to ceiling in decorative tiles made by Minton,

this was a temple to hygiene.

The story of clay began with ceramic pots.

It reached its apogee with ceramic palaces.

The tiles in Harrods Food Hall

were designed and erected by WJ Neatby in 1902

and produced at the Royal Doulton factory in Lambeth.

The preparation and selling of fresh meat and fish was revolutionised by ceramic tiling,

which could be wiped clean and disinfected.

But the usefulness of ceramic tiles didn't stop at preventing infection.

They also found an attractive role in distracting those already afflicted.

Bolingbroke Hospital in South London closed for redevelopment in 2008.

In the eerie quiet,

its children's ward remains a masterpiece of ceramic decoration.

One of the wonderful qualities about tile work is that it can provide

lively decoration, colourful decoration.

And this is of course particularly suitable for hospitals,

in particular children's hospitals,

where there is a desire to enliven the atmosphere of the wards.

This is very much exploited by manufacturers such as Doulton's

at the turn of the 20th century,

with very colourful tile panels, with subjects such as nursery rhymes on them,

and they in their own publicity material really made the claim that these would enliven

the enforced stay of the weary sufferers

and bring fresh thoughts of nature to their tired minds.

By the 20th century, the story of British pottery had become a familiar one.

The major innovations of form had been made,

and were being used widely by industry, artists, and amateurs alike.

The variety came in how they were used.

The basic ceramic materials,

stoneware, earthenware and porcelain,

those remain the same today.

They are the same materials you see on the shelves as you would have seen over the last 300 years.

The only thing that's changed, however,

is the way in which those objects have been processed.

The way the whole process has been industrialised.

The way the human hand has largely been taken out

of the whole process,

and that's why ceramics where the human hand is still visible,

is so interesting.

At the heart of it all,

despite the technological advances, remains clay,

and our intimate relationship with this most fundamental substance.

Through the ages, clay has captured our hopes and aspirations.

It reveals our innate desire for beauty

and the need to commemorate.

The story of clay is the story of Britain itself.

What it contains are the moments of our lives.

It brings you back to earth all the time.

So it's...

it's a life.

In the next episode...

A world industry,

and a ruined Empire.

The pioneering men and women

who made some of the most beautiful objects

ever created on these shores.

It's the story of Stoke-on-Trent and the age of Wedgwood.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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