Stoke-on-Trent pottery relights its kilns after 18 months in administration

The kilns at one of Burslem’s last working potteries were fired on Monday for the first time since the spring of 2025, after a consortium of former managers and a Staffordshire investment fund completed the purchase of the business from administrators and rehired 140 of its former staff.

Sytch Lane Pottery, which made tableware for hotels and restaurants until it collapsed with debts of £6m amid soaring gas prices, will restart production of its core range next week and expects to employ 200 people by next summer. The factory had 310 workers when it closed. Its former chief operating officer, Diane Shenton, leads the new company, which has bought the site, the moulds and the brand for £2.1m.

“We were not a bad business. We were a business that used £90,000 of gas a month and had a contract from 2021 that doubled overnight,” Shenton said. “The new owners have put in electric kilns for the smaller runs and we have a gas price we can live with. The skill never left Burslem. It went and worked at the distribution sheds and waited.”

The reopening comes as figures from the British Ceramic Confederation show the Potteries’ industry grew by 3% in the year to June, its first expansion since 2019, after a decade in which Stoke lost about 2,000 ceramics jobs and a run of closures that included the city’s oldest tile works. The confederation attributes the recovery to the energy support scheme for intensive industries agreed last year and to orders from hotel groups moving away from Asian suppliers.

Stoke-on-Trent city council contributed £400,000 to the rescue through its business growth fund and will defer business rates for two years. The council’s leader, Pauline Heath, said the city could not afford to let another factory with skilled staff go. “Every time a pottery closes, a set of skills that took 20 years to build goes to a warehouse on the A500,” she said. “Getting 140 of them back through the gate is as important to this city as any inward investment.”

Among those returning is Barry Hollins, 58, a caster who began at the factory in 1985 and spent the 18 months of closure driving a delivery van. “I never thought I would get my hands in slip again,” he said. “My dad did this job and his dad. The van was fine, but it was not this.”

The new owners have won an initial order for 180,000 pieces from a restaurant chain and a contract to make commemorative ware for a cathedral’s 2027 anniversary. They plan to open the factory to visitors from the spring, following the lead of the city’s larger makers, whose tours drew 190,000 people last year.

The gas kilns will fire at 1,180C for 36 hours. Shenton said the first pieces out, due on Thursday, would be a run of 500 plain white mugs, to be given to the staff.