Rye Pottery

Prince Harry & Meghan Markle

Continuing Rye Pottery’s long tradition of marking significant Royal occasions, we’ve produced a limited-edition run of commemorative tankards to mark the upcoming wedding of Prince Harry & Meghan Markle.

Hand-thrown & hand-decorated in soft Cobalt Blue on a simple white glaze, they are 8-8.5cm high.

These little mugs have been designed to tie-in with previous pieces produced, particularly those made for the wedding of Prince William & Catherine and Prince Charles & Princess Diana, for whom we were official suppliers to St Paul’s Cathedral.

Available from stock or to order, or in our shop in Rye where you might like to emulate Princess Diana’s late Mum and snap any seconds we might have.

£ 24 each – Please CLICK HERE to buy one. 

HM The Queen’s 90th Birthday

To commemorate Her Majesty The Queen’s 90th Birthday Celebrations Rye Pottery are producing a limited edition hand-made & hand-painted 10 inch plate.

Designed by Tarquin Cole this piece is intricately hand-painted in our classic Blue-Green. The result we believe is an elegant plate that works well as a standalone piece but also ties in with all our designs over the decades for those of our collectors who have them all!

New Collectors do note that Blue Green is a traditional Rye Pottery colour that’s been mixed & by us for over 60 years. This colour produces incredible results & allows us to add immense depth and delicacy to the design using just a single colour. That also means each piece reacts differently in every firing of the kiln so all the plates we paint are guaranteed to differ slightly to this photograph!

These beautiful plates are £145.00 each with free p&p and will be painted to order for each customer. Our order schedule is currently running at an estimated 6-8 weeks until delivery.

Please email us at sales@ryepottery.co.uk or give us a call on +44 (0) 1797 223038  if you would like to order one.

Prince George it is then

His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge – A great name choice from our perspective. Not only was it on our list of favourites, but it’s also short, which from a potting, lettering, design perspective is a jolly useful thing indeed!

So that means our beautiful hand-thrown tankards are now available. Our long-term collectors will spot that this latest Rye Pottery Royal Tankard features a design based on the pieces we produced to mark Prince William’s own birth back in 1982.

Our Prince George Tankards feature our two most popular colourways for our Royal Commemorative pieces – Cobalt Blue and Blue Green.

These charming little mugs are decorated with hand-printed (not digital) transfers and additional hand-painted banding and they are £18.00 each plus p&p

Do let us know soon if you would like to order one or if you pop into our shop in Rye you might even pick up a second.

Having said that our seconds don’t hang around long. Back in 1982, William’s maternal grandmother – Princess Diana’s mum – bought a second from our London shop in Connaught Street. So you see, it’s official, Rye Pottery seconds are fit even for a (future) king!

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The Prince of Cambridge – Finally here but for us no name means …

We all send The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge our best wishes on the birth of their first son – The Prince of Cambridge.

But please may we beg the happy parents not to keep us all waiting too long to hear what he is to be called. We – alongside countless other British companies around the country – are all waiting primed and ready to fire our hand-made and hand-decorated commemorative ceramic tankards in the kiln, but, when, and only when, they reveal the last piece of the puzzle. Like many other British firms, we have the additional problem of summer holidays, as if they delay the naming for too long some of our talented but small team will be away on their well earned holidays. HM the Queen was not the only person wanting everything to be sorted before the holidays arrived!

In the hope of being as prepared as possible we’ve worked through a host of different designs to allow for different months, long names, short names and so on. Not that it’s useful to anyone but privately some of us reckon it won’t be a Richard (pre-Tudor), or even a William (too close to his dad), and definitely not Cnut! But we quite fancy George or possibly Albert. If it was a girl we were quite sure Alexandra, Elizabeth or Victoria had a very good chance – but alas, that’s for the next one, and fortunately our business is making pottery not bookmaking!

Our hand-thrown tankards will be produced just as they were when Prince William was born back in 1982.  Featuring the two most popular colourways for our Royal Commemorative pieces, Cobalt Blue and Blue Green, these charming little mugs will be decorated with hand-printed (not digital) transfers and additional hand-painted banding. All very traditional and quintessentially Rye Pottery.

The waiting list for these limited edition tankards commemorating the Birth of the Prince of Cambridge is already growing from our band of dedicated collectors, so do let us know soon if you would like one. The mugs are £18.00 each plus p&p.

As soon as we have a name we’ll hope to provide a sneak peak here of the design.

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VIVAT REGINA! – The 60th Anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation

Hand-painted Rye Pottery Commemorative ware to mark the anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation Click to enlarge

This year to mark the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation we have produced a very limited number of hand-made and hand-painted bowls and tankards.

June Woolley, who started work as a 15 year-old in 1953 and still comes in voluntarily to act as archivist and layout magician for us, painted some of the pots and bowls while Julie Catt, who came out of retirement to help us, has also produced one or two pieces not least the striking 12-inch bowl featured here.

We are planning to make a small transfer mug for William and Kate’s new baby when he or she finally makes an appearance; the timing looks as if it should coincide with the special Coronation weekend of celebration in mid July, which means we will hope to manage two Royal windows through the summer.

Close-up of the intricate, hand-painted crown – Click to enlarge

Searching for display material to help decorate our Shop Window here in Rye has produced all sorts of royal memorabilia. Tarquin, who was still in the Navy back in 1953, won 2 tickets to watch the whole procession from a very comfortable spot within Admiralty Arch.

All of which means we’ve had several newspapers from the period stashed away as well as 2 copies of the Official Programme. We’ve also saved a wonderfully evocative 1953 edition of British Vogue.

Do come and have a look at our window if you’re passing.

Rye Pottery on BBC Radio

Well I fear we are not as quick as the Neapolitan Potter who already has his pregnant Kate & William figure on sale by Wednesday, but we are thinking hard of what designs we will  decide on in due course.

First and foremost though I feel we should all wait a while and give the poor girl time to overcome the dreaded morning sickness. I have huge sympathy with that problem having suffered from it for all of my darling children!

Radio Sussex rang up on Tuesday morning to ask what we would be doing, which caught me on the hop a little, though I am sure we will do one of our collectable small transfer tankards when next June/ July actually comes!

Biddy Cole 

We’ll hope to add the audio of Biddy talking to morning show radio host Danny Pike soon but in the meantime you can listen via the BBC iplayer here.

Rye Pottery in the Local papers

Hot on the heels of Biddy’s appearance in the Mail on Sunday, a great piece about our Royal Jubilee Commemorative pieces in our supportive local paper – The Rye and Battle Observer.

“Rye Pottery is the original and also the last remaining pottery in Rye, but it is also one of just a handful of English potteries to have consistently manufactured  commemorative items for all the major Royal Events throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth II…

Biddy Cole, from Rye Pottery, said: “One long-established local family recently came to buy Rye Pottery’s Diamond Jubilee mugs for their grandchildren, because they had such fond memories of their own children being given Rye Pottery Silver Jubilee tankards while attending Rye’s primary school back in 1977.

“It was a wonderful symbol of support for both the Diamond Jubilee and our long-standing local manufacturing business, and particularly so in the current economic climate.

”The charm of a hand-decorated mug is still so great and so particular to Rye Pottery that yet again we are struggling to keep up with demand.”

>> Click here to read the whole article and to find out all the latest local news!

Even more Diamond Jubilee.

COBALT BLUE JUBILEE TANKARDS

We are working very hard trying to produce lots of our popular little tankards, but as with all very special things it is quite a process to have one ready to display for sale in the shop.

All the tankards are hand thrown on the wheel by Steve Russeell, who works to carefully pre-set measurements, but of course with anything totally hand made there must always be room for a little variation in width and height!

This clay mug is then bisque fired and brought down to our decorating workshop in Rye, where Julie Catt glazes it,  then paints the bands around the top of the mug and puts the dash onto the handle then it is back into the kiln again.

Finally Betty Sayer  having printed up a  folder full of transfers will apply the transfers carefully, including the Rye Pottery backstamp and it is ready for the final firing in the  kiln.  So as you will appreciate we really do sell a Diamond Jubilee  Tankard which is both hand made and hand decorated here in Rye.

DIAMOND JUBILEE

HAND PAINTED DIAMOND JUBILEE PLATE

Although the first week end of June will be the time for the  main Diamond Jubilee celebrations, February 6th is the actual date of Her Majesty’s accession in 1952.  We have been working hard to have some special pieces ready, we had already sold our first handpainted plate sample to a regular customer who is involved in various civic celebrations, fortunately we have painted a  few more which we have now fired!

We are planning to  have a display in our shop  of some of our Commemorative Jubilee pottery which we will hope to change as and when  new pieces appear!  Our current problem is that somehow we have managed to only put one of the 2 relevant dates on the first trial batch of little tankards. At least this is a fault we can easily put right,  just need to stay awake while putting the transfer onto the tankard;  unlike the plate we painted for the Queen and Prince Philip’s Silver Wedding in 1972 when we managed to write PRICNCE (sic) instead of prince and did not notice it until it was fired and ready to go on display!

STOP PRESS  correctly dated tankards with the right dates just  starting to come through the system.

Rye Pottery gears up to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee

This year we are, in total contrast to last year’s Royal Wedding, all geared up and raring to go with new Rye Pottery designs to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

We have planned and painted a sample of our hand-painted large plate, as well as designing the artwork for the much-loved little transfer tankards and small dishes.  We hope to add some one-off pots throughout the next 6 months, which will be sold on a strictly first come first served basis.

Rye Pottery have produced Royal Commemoratives for over 100 years. Hastings Museum has a 1902 jug made for Edward VII  and we’ve also seen trials and drawings for an Edward VIII 1936 mug designed by Robert “Bobby” Baker (later Professor of Ceramics at the Royal College of Art while Tarquin was a student) who before WW2 was working for Rural Industries.

The post-war Cole dynasty at Rye Pottery made tankards and dishes for the 1953 Coronation and have never looked back, producing special designs for each succeeding Royal event. We even printed 2 miles of 6 inch square tiles during the 1981 Royal Wedding celebrations.

Recently we bought two lovely Royal pieces on ebay, one of which, a Wally Cole design, is we believe a one-off.

Rye Pottery in the Mail on Sunday

Biddy has just been interviewed for a piece in this weekend’s Mail on Sunday about William and Kate’s imminent nuptials.

Rye Pottery has been producing commemorative pieces to mark every Royal occasion since the Prince of Wales’s investiture in 1969 – and the upcoming Royal Wedding is no exception.

While not everyone is lucky enough to have British manufacturers flurrying to produce a host of products to commemorate their special dates, here at Rye Pottery we produce beautiful one-off designs and pieces for personal and corporate special occasions – weddings, christenings, even just plain old Thank You’s! Every piece is individually hand-made, hand-lettered and decorated to order.

Click the following link to visit our shop and see some examples  of our Bespoke Ceramics.

Or click here to read Biddy’s Interview with the Mail on Sunday