Emma Bridgewater interview: Labour meddling in business is ‘a really bad idea'

Telegraph

05-07-2025

It's a sweltering day – muggy and drizzly – as my taxi crawls through a patchwork of east London council estates. When we finally arrive at the unassuming two-up, two-down Victorian terrace near Columbia Road where I am to meet Dame Emma Bridgewater (of the eponymous posh pottery), the venue looks so unlikely I double-check the address before knocking on the door.
Dame Emma, 64, is one of the most successful British entrepreneurs of her generation, a woman who single-handedly revived the UK's traditional potteries in Stoke-on-Trent. Her company, founded in 1985, is a byword for British style globally, and in the ultimate mark of favour, her factories have been visited by royalty – the Princess of Wales and King Charles III have taken tours. Various reports put her personal wealth at more than £14 million.
Do people find it strange that she has chosen to live here? She laughs, heartily. 'Well, some people do, like my church warden in Wapping, who described this street as a 'frightful slum'.' She chuckles, pouring tea – a special blend of Indian mixed with Earl Grey and lapsang souchong that tastes just like the cup my granny used to make. It is served in one of her own pots (from her new Indian summer collection) and in a mug painted with pinks and sweet peas. She is right that Columbia Road is on the up; amid the council flats blooms a veritable hipster paradise of fancy boutiques, coffee bars and, of course, the historic flower market. But it is not where most would picture a multi-millionaire dame choosing to dwell.
She smiles again, explaining: 'I love living here because my grown-up kids are nearby; they can all pop in easily whenever they like, which is bliss.' Dame Emma has four children aged from 24 to 34 – three of them live within a few miles of this house, while her eldest daughter, Lil, and her beloved only grandchild, Louis, two, live in Bampton, Oxfordshire, 'in the barn [she] converted'.
Bampton is the farm where she lived with Matthew Rice, her husband for 30 years until they separated in 2018. He is a writer and artist who also worked as her designer – 'particularly the patterns including birds, which he is inordinately fond of shooting'. Ouch.
The pair had another house near Blakeney in north Norfolk which is now Dame Emma's. But she spends the majority of her time here in the East End. 'It's the first time I've had a London house since Matthew and I sold our home in Fulham and moved out to the country back in the Eighties. He never liked the city, but for me it really is coming home, I'm absolutely loving it.'
She insists that their separation is amicable, explaining that Rice still designs for her brand. That sounds hard. She grimaces. 'Well, you've got to work at it. Divorce is a character test that you can fail on a daily basis. But when we are out of sorts with each other it's just too sad for the children. As a parent you've just got to keep on trying to make it OK.'
I love her practical wisdom. Yes, it's hard to get divorced, but it's also important to be decent. The situation was further complicated because Dame Emma had never taken external investment in her company. Right from the beginning, she boot-strapped its growth on sales revenue. But after the divorce, in order to pay her husband a settlement, she sold a stake to investment firm BGF. The company invested £8 million in 2020 and a further £2.2 million in 2024, and she has stepped down as chief executive. Currently she is 'an active board member and creative director' (the next season's products still all originate in the trends memo she writes every year) and, of course, the founder. 'I am phasing myself out of the company,' she says firmly. 'I want Emma Bridgewater to be around in another 40 years' time, which means it has to go on without me.'
It must be incredibly hard to let go? She nods. 'It is the right time. I am still around to help, but we are looking for a new creative director.'
Switching the subject, she says she would love to mentor a new generation of UK makers. 'It's so important that we produce everything we need here in the UK, but most of our plates are made in Indonesia. It's such a shame, as we have such a brilliant skilled workforce. Of course, that had almost gone when I started making pots in Stoke in the Eighties, but it's having another dive now.'
This year, she explains, has already seen the demise of several established potteries, including Moorcroft and Royal Stafford. Even Emma Bridgewater has had troubles, posting a loss of £4.4 million in April 2024. The company insists it has since restructured and is back on track. But during our two-hour conversation, Dame Emma complains several times about 'high energy costs – the most expensive in the world – which are making an energy-dependent business like ours increasingly difficult'. She reminds me that the famous potteries (Davenport, Spode and Wedgwood) were located in Stoke specifically because of coal: 'They needed cheap, accessible energy for the high-temperature firing required to make fine ceramics.'
The founding of her company is the stuff of business legend. 'I was out shopping, looking for two cups and saucers for my mum. Her kitchen was the cosiest, merriest place in the world – where everyone gossiped purposefully, putting the world to rights. But there was not a single thing in that china shop which had a place in my mum's kitchen, and as I stood there I had a vision of an old pine dresser in the sun, full of mismatched, brightly coloured, hand-painted china. That vision just grabbed me. I'd never made a pot but I knew that I could. And then I went to Stoke-on Trent, and I went to a workshop where 12 workers were making things out of clay, and I just knew that my vision was going to happen there.' She was 23.
Dame Emma began making the patterns with old sponges and sold the results in Jubilee Market in Covent Garden in 1983. They were so popular she got 150 shops interested at a trade fair. 'It made me see that I had something that people really wanted. That's the key to business – there has to be an appetite for the product.'
It's not just pottery; Dame Emma has creativity running through her veins. Casually, she picks up a beautiful quilt, explaining that she made it herself, and then shows me another of her creative endeavours: a colourful crochet blanket. 'My granny taught me to crochet when I was eight, but I had forgotten. I taught myself again with a Ladybird book.' Is she always making something? She nods. 'Making stuff is everything to me. And the business of making, too, I mean. It's amazing having a business with a tangible output. Factories have an amazing energy.'
I ask about her early troubles with the pottery unions, when industrial strife was common in the 1980s. 'I believe in fairness. We always cared about our people – it's why I'm living here, not in a mansion! Don't start a business just to make money, it has to have a wider purpose; you have to love the idea, it has to fill you with excitement and passion. Every time I go to Stoke I feel huge pride in my incredible potters, the human resilience, the skills we have saved from obsolescence. This is our 40th year and during that time, yes… it has been tough. Sure, I've cried in meetings with the unions, because it matters so much to me to keep this industry going and the tradition of all those skills. There's nothing sadder than a closed factory.'
So, as one of our most famous businesswomen, how does she reckon the Labour Government is doing? Is Sir Keir Starmer keeping his promise to boost UK growth? She frowns, raises her eyebrows and fiddles with her white broderie anglaise dress. What about the increase in National Insurance paid by employers? At that she takes the bait. 'Well,' she says crossly. 'That's just politics by people who have never had another job. I mean, if you had ever employed people you'd know that [the NI hike] was a really, really bad idea. Whacking up NI was not sensible – they think we can pass it on to the customer, but no, we can't.'
She's not done. 'I don't want the Government to get involved in my business. I think they should be concentrating on improving the education system. And to be clear, that doesn't mean making teachers do more to bring the children up.' (This is personal, one of Dame Emma's children is a primary school teacher in a poor area of east London.)
So what should the education system be doing to boost growth? 'Well, if I was queen I would want kids to come out of school moderately literate and numerate, but also resilient and creative. I mean, not having had their creativity stomped out of them. I want a world where we make stuff here in the UK.
'Both Labour in their 'white heat of technology' phase and Margaret Thatcher afterwards were all about getting everything manufactured more cheaply abroad, though they never came out and said that… We need a Britain where school equips you for making things. Our school system seems to have completely ignored the doers. We have fantastic doers in this country but we don't do anything for them.'
What about the nearly one million young people aged 16 to 24 who are Neet – not in education, employment or training – do they really want to work?
She nods. 'There's this whole discourse about people who don't want to go to work, but I just don't think that is the case. Take Stoke. Yes, we have to be a little bit creative about recruiting. And young men are quite hard to draw into our industry for sound historical reasons; their fathers and grandfathers and uncles and aunts were all laid off summarily. Girls are much more flexible and resilient. That is what schooling should be about: making us more flexible and resilient. We don't need to be training our entire population to be academics. It's ludicrous. A small number of people want to do esoteric study. Go to All Souls [Oxford]. Marvellous. But the doers need attention too. The economy depends on them. It's got to be about making and doing.'
She blames 'the kind of people in government' for the current mess. 'The New Labour project was an absolute shower. That's when the grown-ups left the building. There was no more sensible planning after that. No policy for energy, as is manifestly obvious – energy is more expensive in this country than anywhere else. But there's no plan for transport, or health or education either.'
There are pros and cons to an entrepreneurial life, she says. 'You're going to work incredibly hard. You will make compromises that hurt, and you will lose friendships. It's hard. But though you work hard, you do have agency in your own life, and the ability to do well and to put big things right. That is the best feeling, of course.'
Dame Emma is a polymath, quoting poetry, whizzing around to festivals as well as her factories; she's one of those people who seems to cram in more by breakfast time than most of us achieve in a month. I congratulate her on her recent damehood. How does it feel? 'There's an interesting question,' she pauses, uncharacteristically tongue-tied and obviously touched. 'It was a massive treat, a huge surprise. I'm definitely going to be giving some great dame lunches: Prue Leith is top of the list. But I would also do it for all my favourite women: my sisters, my daughters, my nieces. It's so fun being from a huge family tribe.'
She starts telling me how she and her sisters, the writer and journalist Clover Stroud, and Nell Gifford (who founded Gifford's Circus and who died in 2019) 'fantasised about living in a commune together with all the kids. It would have been marvellous in lots of ways. We even found a house with medieval ruins for sale which had come from a racing family… but Nell was very clear she would be living in the castle, I was being encouraged to build in the walled garden and Clover was being allocated the hen house. So it would never have worked,' she sighs.
It is clear the loss of Gifford is still raw. Dame Emma jumps up and starts unfolding a huge quilt she has sewn for one of Gifford's children. 'I've made quilts for the whole family.' They have quotes from Dylan Thomas's poetry on them, a bit like the words on her pots. 'My mother was buried in the quilt I made her, it was her shroud… and Nell was buried in hers too.' We pause and are silent together for a moment.
I remark on the family drive; how she and Gifford both founded and built these huge empires. 'You know, we never really discussed it, and now it is too late,' she says sadly.
But she admits that creativity and get-up-and-go are family traits. Her father was a publisher. Dame Emma was born in Cambridge and studied English literature at the University of London. Tragedy struck in 1991 when her mother had a riding accident and suffered a severe head injury from which she never recovered. She died in 2013. I am always fascinated by how many hyper-successful people have a tragedy in their past; like a reminder that life is short, we need to get on with it.
Dame Emma points to the bookshelf behind me (crammed with a cornucopia of titles including An Anthology of British Teapots). On the top shelf is a white china jug embossed with the word 'gruel'. 'That's extraordinary really,' she says. 'It belonged to my grandmother. It is the modern equivalent of having a jug with 'poverty' written on it.' Is that where she got the idea to create her pottery with words? She nods. 'I'm toying with doing one with the word 'reform' on it.'
Is she a fan of Nigel Farage? 'Goodness gracious, no. But I think we need reform – with a small R – now.'
I wonder how she is going to fill her time; will she retire? The question is greeted with a snort of derision. 'I feel that if you have got the energy and the ability to make some improvement, somewhere, then you should crack on. Don't feel you've got to go and get on a golf course just because everyone else does… I mean, all my friends are on holiday now, all the time. What are they on holiday from? I took one of them to task the other night, and he went: 'Em, we haven't all had an interesting, swashbuckling time like you. We've worked in banks. It was horrible. Of course, we deserve now to have a holiday.''
So does that go for her too? She shakes her head. 'I love travelling and since my divorce I have taken up long walks, pilgrimages, I've done the Camino and the Saints' Way. It is a wonderful way to deal with stress – I see it as walking back to myself. But while I love those kind of challenges, I am not going to retire, no. I am interested by the people who don't let go, who don't stop. My in-laws were both freelance designers till they died, their work kept them stimulated and in the world till the very end. I watched my dad retire very early, at 54 – much too much time spent in the Garrick – and thought, that's a really bad plan.'
Our time is coming to an end and I am packing up my stuff when Dame Emma makes a startling confession. 'You know, my dad always tried to make out that Emma Bridgewater was his idea, that he was running it. As if a company owned and run by a woman couldn't be a success,' she confides. That obviously stings. But it shouldn't.
The truth is that Dame Emma is 'loving being in her 60s' in her urban nest; the founder of one of Britain's most famous companies, and the beloved mother of a close and loving clan. And now, like the cherry on the top, she's been made a dame. Any father would be proud.