Nantgarw is a few miles drive north of Cardiff and is a small site packed with history. From the moment you walk through the front door of Nantgarw house, you see cabinets full of beautiful porcelain plates, cups, jugs and trays. There’s an introductory video from the late BBC Antiques Roadshow expert Henry Sandon, who loved Nantgarw. I had a guided tour with Celia, one of 20 volunteers working for the Nantgarw Chinaworks Trust which runs the museum for the Rhondda Cynon Taf Council. Tours can be provided in English or Welsh.
The original house was built in the 1790s by Edward Edwards during the Regency period. He also had a house in Penrhos, now modernised next to Caerphilly Garden Centre. Nantgarw House was built on the bank of the Glamorganshire Canal, which had been built to transport coal from Merthyr down to Cardiff towards the Severn Estuary, and then onto the rest of the world. The 25-mile canal had 52 locks and opened in 1790, running through Tongwynlais, Taffs Well, Nantgarw, Pontypridd, splitting at Abercynon, one branch going to Aberdare, the other to Merthyr via Aberfan. The Canal was the most important means of transport of goods until the creation of the Taff Valley Railway, the last part of the Canal finally closing in 1951. Now it has been reclaimed by nature and is just a murky stream.
Nantgarw was an ideal place to set up a pottery due to the Canal and an abundance of labour, which is why William Billingsley was drawn to the area. Billingsley designed and produced high quality porcelain, decorated in floral designs in bright colours, the rose being his favourite. His rose became known as the ‘Prentice Plate’, used as a standard for apprentices, and is still displayed at Derby Museum. Billingsley worked at Royal Worcester and had to sign an agreement that he would never tell a third party how he made his special type of porcelain. But there was nothing to stop him from making it himself, so he fled Worcester one night with his family and set up in Nantgarw in 1813.
The reason why Billingsley’s porcelain was so special is because it was so white, translucent and delicate and beautiful designs could be painted on it. The Quaker entrepreneur William Weston Young soon became a financial backer at Nantgarw and the high-quality products were mainly sold to wealthy people in London, where there was a culture of afternoon tea. Agents in London would commission white porcelain from Billingsley and then commission other artists to paint them in the style of European countries. Nantgarw currently holds works commissioned by the Prince Regent in 1818 for his brother Adolphus’ wedding. There is also a plate from the Cardiff Castle collection.
- Model of the Chinaworks in its heyday
It wasn’t easy to make the delicate porcelain because when heated in the kilns, it would distort and collapse; up to 90% of the products would break which was poor business sense as the high failure rate increased production costs. After a few years, Billingsley went to Swansea Pottery to develop his skills further. When he returned to Nantgarw, he had a few more productive years but continued to face financial problems. In 1820, he left Nantgarw to work at the famous porcelain pottery in Coalport. Young, left behind, sold off the rest of the remaining stock to try to recuperate costs, bringing in his artist friend Thomas Pardoe to decorate the porcelain, mainly with flowers and birds, but he couldn’t glaze it as well as Billingsley because he didn’t have his ‘secret recipe’. The business was over by 1822. Billingsley died in 1828 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Kemberton, but his legacy lives on in rare surviving pieces of Nantgarw porcelain which collect a high price now.
- Samples of pottery found on the site
- One of the surviving kilns
In 1833, William Henry Pardoe, son of Thomas, took over the pottery to make bottles and earthenware and day tobacco pipes. The business continued for another generation, making 10,000 pipes a week, employing 20 people, until its closure in 1920, when cigarettes replaced clay pipes. The last Pardoes left Nantgarw in the 1970s.
Taff-Ely County Borough Council bought the derelict site in 1989 and restored the kilns and buildings that they could. It opened in 1991 as a museum. Due to budget cuts at the council, it closed in 2008, only to be reopened in 2010 by two artists. There are artists studios on the site as well as exhibitions and craft classes including fused glass making, botanical painting, and silver clay jewellery. I particularly like attending the craft and antiques fayres there. Nantgarw can cater for coach trips of up to 35 people and they have a little tearoom.
You can buy jewellery made from original broken Billingsley porcelain at the museum. There is a Billingsley Rose Garden and Nantgarw has its own bees to make honey. And once again, artists at Nantgarw are making world class porcelain from Billingsley’s original recipe. The recipe was determined from the analysis of porcelain fragments by three universities and with access to the coded recipe from the V&A Museum. There is 30-40% less breakage of porcelain in the kilns. New pieces can be commissioned by anyone.
As I said at the start, a small place, but it leaves a big impression.
Visit: nantgarwchinaworksmuseum.co.uk
Words & pictures: Irram Irshad
