Each May, London Craft Week brings together makers across the city in a celebration of materials and process. This year, we have partnered with Leach Pottery on an exclusive collection and a series of one-of-a-kind pieces created by members of the St Ives studio. The tableware collection, which is exclusively available to purchase at our Notting Hill shop until 18 May, draws inspiration from Japanese tea ceremonies, and explores traditional techniques with a playful and considered approach.
Founded in 1920 by Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, Leach Pottery remains one of the world’s most respected studio potteries. Its approach was a quiet revolution: a move away from ornament for ornament’s sake, and towards pots intended for daily use. It is a way of making that sits closely alongside our belief in considered design: a respect for utility, and an enduring reverence for materials.
“TOAST produces very beautiful but practical clothes,” says Roelof Uys, Lead Potter at Leach Pottery. “For me, there’s a timeless feel.” He speaks of his studio in similar terms - a place where the past shapes the present, and where every pot carries traces of those who came before.
The pieces in the collection are not intended to replicate historical tea wares, but to engage with the spirit of the ceremony - the slowness, the tactility, the attention to gesture. Each potter responded differently, drawing on their own rhythms and visual language. “It was really important that the work wasn’t just mimicking traditional forms,” says Roelof, who curated the project. “We encouraged original designs using contemporary processes and modern forms of expression in mark making, while still respecting the tradition.”
For TOAST, collaboration is not simply a matter of aesthetics, but of understanding - placing value on the process behind each piece, and on the lived experience of the maker. This ethos is echoed at Leach, where function and form are never at odds, and where the act of making is given time.
Studio potter Britta James was drawn to the chaki, or tea caddy - a container for powdered tea, often lacquered and cylindrical. Her version plays with that idea through form and material: a fluted lid, a tenmoku glaze with quiet depth, and a sense of contained ceremony. She also created Pensive, a double-walled bowl inspired by the hidden pools along the Cornish coast - small places of stillness, shaped by the tide.
Callum Cowie contributes footed vessels and expressive bowls, their curved surfaces marked by swift brushwork and traces of the hand. Apprentice potter Amy Wilson drew on the aesthetic of wabi sabi - natural imperfection - in a series of narrow-lidded flower vases. “I hope visitors to TOAST gain an understanding of the Japanese concept of mingei,” she says, “and feel the little bit of life and spirit that all of us have put into each piece.”
The work of Matt Foster is looser, more gestural - vessels layered with slips and markings that suggest landscapes, memory and myth. “They are sketchbooks or journals of who I am,” he says. “Some of the drawings are obvious, others hidden. They allow for interpretation and discovery.”
Roelof’s own response is the mizusashi - a water jar, traditionally used in tea ceremonies to replenish the kettle. His form is quiet, almost architectural, with a subtle presence. “Natural form is the foundation of all good design,” he says. “Pattern is a distillation of beauty.”
While each piece in the collection stands alone, they also speak to one another - not through uniformity, but through a shared vocabulary. “The beauty of functional pots is that they’re made to be used,” Roelof says. “Unlike sculpture in a museum, the user is given permission to touch.”
Across our collections, there is a respect for quiet utility, for the marks of the hand, and for the slower pace of traditional making. The Leach partnership is one expression of this - a project that honours lineage while creating space for experimentation. An invitation to hold, to pour, and to notice.
The TOAST & Leach Pottery collection is available to purchase exclusively at our Notting Hill shop until Sunday 1 May.
Register to join us for an evening with Roelof Uys on Thursday 15 May, 6:30pm - 8pm.
Words by Lauren Sneade.
Photography by Leia Morrisson.
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