Blog Arts de la table — General

Some china patterns are simply chosen. Others become part of the family.

They begin as a dinner service, tea set or everyday tableware range, bought for practical reasons and used over many years. Then, slowly, they become something more familiar. The plates used at Sunday lunch. The cups brought out when visitors came round. The bowls that appeared at breakfast. The teapot everyone recognised without thinking about it.

And years later, when those pieces are inherited, they often carry far more than pattern names and backstamps.

Once you spend enough time around discontinued china, a strange thing starts to happen.

You stop watching television properly.

Because there it is. A familiar pattern. A discontinued dinner plate. A teapot you have handled before. A mug that makes you mutter, “hang on, is that Hornsea?”

Welcome to the oddly satisfying world of Tableware TV.

It is a question we are asked surprisingly often. Is this piece genuine? Could it be a fake? Why is the backstamp different? Why does this pattern look almost the same as another one? The reassuring answer is that, in the everyday replacement china market,...

When people think about collectable or replacement china, the big pottery names often come to mind first. Denby, Hornsea, Royal Worcester, Wedgwood, Poole Pottery and the like all have strong identities, long histories and plenty of well-known patterns.

But some of the most familiar tableware in British homes did not start with a pottery name.

It came from retailers.

Plain white china sounds simple enough. No bold pattern, no flowers, no dramatic border, no complicated colourway to match.

But anyone who has tried to replace a piece from a white tableware range will know that “plain white” is rarely quite as plain as it first appears.

Shape, glaze, rim detail, weight, finish and even the shade of white can all make a difference. Sometimes the appeal of a white pattern is precisely that the design is quiet, but quiet does not mean without character.

When you are trying to replace a piece of discontinued china, the pattern name is often the first and most useful thing to know.

In many cases, that is enough. If you know the maker and the pattern, you are usually well on the way to finding the right replacement piece.

However, there are times when the backstamp can make all the difference.

One of the slightly odd things about replacement china is that it does not behave like ordinary retail stock.

If a current product sells out in a shop, the retailer can usually order more. With discontinued china, it is different. Once a pattern is no longer being made, every plate, bowl, mug or serving dish has to come from the pieces already out there in the world.

That means some items are available regularly, while others may take a little patience.

When people think about replacing china, it is usually the obvious pieces that come to mind first. Dinner plates, bowls, mugs, cups and saucers… the everyday items that are used, washed, stacked and occasionally dropped.

But every good dinner service had another layer to it. The pieces that made a table feel properly set. The teapot, the gravy boat, the serving platter, the vegetable dish, the tureen.