It's been a difficult week for the world and in particular for the people of Ukraine 🇺🇦💔. So today I thought to find a piece of porcelain that we can take heart from. It is widely known (although if you live somewhere far from Europe, you may not know it) that the island of Ireland went through a difficult struggle, and still does to some degree. In the 19th Century the whole island was under British rule; today most of the island is the Irish Republic, and the northern pa

I was very lucky to come across some extremely rare Derby porcelain the other day: two tiny coffee cups made by Derby in about 1795. Both have exquisite little landscape paintings; one painted by the famous Zachariah Boreman, and the other by Thomas "Jockey" Hill. Zachariah Boreman is sometimes called "The king of landscapes". He painted gorgeously fine, crisp and autumnal-tinted landscapes and with Boreman, less is more: he often used very few colours and sometimes painted l

Have you ever wondered why Staffordshire became the centre of the global porcelain industry in the late 18th and 19th Century? I dug into this question and you can read all about it in my latest column in Homes & Antiques. This hilly area north of Birmingham, south of Manchester and east of Liverpool was an unassuming rural backwater up to about the year 1700. But what made it special was that the tiny villages, home to no more than a few thousand people, were sitting on ext

It's going to be Valentine's Day! And did you need any last-minute gifts? I've made a special page for small gifts for him or for her, you can click here. But where does Valentine's Day come from? Saint Valentine of Rome was an early Christian priest who was imprisoned and martyred in the year 269, when Christians were still persecuted by the Romans. Apparently during his imprisonment he restored sight to the daughter of his prison guard, and as a result Pope Gelasius made hi