Emma Bridgewater on guerilla gardening, Nimbyism and feeling relief at her mother's death

Emma Bridgewater photographed at the Watts Gallery, Compton in June 2016
Emma Bridgewater photographed at the Watts Gallery, Compton in June 2016 Credit: Charlie Forgham-Bailey for the Telegraph

She is best known for her eponymous pottery business - the jolly, quintessentially British mugs and plates that fill the kitchen cupboards of middle England. But Emma Bridgewater has not hitherto been known as a countryside campaigner: until now.

Next week, Bridgewater is being formally unveiled to the members of the Campaign to Protect Rural England as its new president at the group’s annual general meeting.

Her appointment represents a departure for the charity - her predecessors were from the literary world, former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion and author Bill Bryson.

We meet at the Watts Gallery outside Guildford where she is supporting a programme to encourage young people to take up pottery for her first interview in her new role.

Miss Bridgewater says she is determined to use her business experience to bring a degree of pragmatism to the job, and offer a middle way between meeting the housing shortage without sacrificing acre after acre of England’s green and pleasant land.

At her shop in Fulham, West London
At her shop in Fulham, West London Credit: Clara Molden for the Telegraph

And she sympathises with Nimby (Not In My Back Yard) attitudes. 

“It is a small country. It is all of our backyards,” she says, earnestly and clearly concerned, as she sips a cup of coffee in the gallery’s café.

“It is understandable - but we need to have a view of how we develop the country as a whole, intelligently. 

“There is a better compromise we can make than the rather destructive one that is being so often posed when it comes to building new housing.”

Bridgewater, 55, set up her ceramic factory in Stoke-on-Trent 30 years ago - famously, she started to make pottery after trying and failing to find a birthday present for her mother. Today the business, which she runs with her husband, the illustrator Matthew Rice, employs 250 staff and sells £35 million-worth of mugs, plates and other china every year.

Mother to Elizabeth, 26, Kitty, 25, Margaret, 19, and Michael, 16, Bridgewater feels passionately about protecting the green belt for future generations.

“I don’t want to leave them a mess and a muddle. I would feel incredibly proud if I could play some tiny part in making them appreciate the idea of beautifying. 

With her husband Matthew Rice and two of their children
With her husband Matthew Rice and two of their children Credit: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images

“With increasing numbers of us living in cities then the need to be able to walk out into unspoilt country is all the more crystal clear.

“The population is going up - we really, really must be very, very intelligent about how we develop and be mindful of the irreversible nature of development.”

She adds: “We will be hated by our grandchildren if we get this wrong.”

Bridgewater recently made headlines when she spoke movingly at the Hay literary festival of her relief at the death in 2013 of her mother Charlotte Stroud. She had suffered brain damage when she fell from her horse 22 years before. 

Today, she explains that her relief was at the knowledge that her mother, as a Christian, knew she was going to heaven. 

She said: “I felt that – particularly when a Christian dies – you are allowed to rejoice, it is OK, particularly when they have spent 22 years in a very, very difficult half-life.

“And she was somebody who was totally happy to die – it sounds ridiculous, she didn’t want to, but it was something that we all joked about.

“What she hadn’t envisaged was the possibility of being horribly injured in such a way that made life for her family difficult.” 

Charlotte died in a home in Wiltshire, near where she grew up. Bridgewater adds: “I felt happy for her. She knew where she was going. She had a very strong, mystic faith; she did not have any doubt that God existed and did not fear death at all. 

“Death is not a bad thing in every circumstance. Let’s grow up about keeping people alive at all costs.”

Reflecting on her new position with the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Bridgewater feels it’s also time to have a more mature conversation about how to meet the country’s housing needs whilst conserving the countryside and controlling urban sprawl.

She has seen how councils are pressed to release greenfield sites for building, while ignoring industrial wastelands. “There is a very, very big stress on delivering numbers which as always will produce slightly dim results,” she says.

The Conservative Government has insisted it wants to protect the green belt but Bridgewater believes ministers only pay ‘lip service’ to the rules.

Emma Bridgewater
Emma Bridgewater Credit: Charlie Forgham-Bailey for the Telegraph

“It is developers who are driving this business of creating housing, and it is not likely that the big building companies are going to solve our housing crisis in a creative, intelligent, aesthetic way is it? Once you have admitted that then I guess intervention is called for.”

She says there are enough brownfield plots to meet the housing shortage, and is puzzled that David Cameron, whose family home is near her in Oxfordshire, has appeared not to grasp the need to protect the countryside.

She says: “There seems to be a problem that is rather evading him and it would be good if he understood that the developers are rather too much having it their own way.”

Bridgewater wants to see our towns and cities “re-greened” – perhaps by planting more inner city orchards and allotments.

She has even planted one behind her factory in Stoke – and managed to beat off the threat of vandals by sheer bloody-mindedness.

“We planted apple trees on the scrap land out behind us in Stoke, and they were pulled out again and again.

“Matthew would replant them with a notice hanging on them saying ‘Dear apple tree thieves of Hanley, you are being very short sighted. Leave the tree and steal the apples later’. Some of them we replanted three times but they are all now growing.”

Emma Bridgewater ceramics
Emma Bridgewater ceramics Credit: Clara Molden

The orchard now has eight apple and pear trees, a full time gardener and is densely planted with sweet peas, narcissi and alliums, with roses around the walls.

She adds: “It would be so nice to, for example, develop self-build amongst fruit trees. I love the idea of urban orchards and more allotments.”

She says it is important we “clear up the mess we have left in our post-industrial cities” for our children and their children.

She is all too aware of the burden of responsibility she has taken on in her new role with the CPRE.

High on her agenda is to encourage people to explore Britain more and celebrate the “restorative” beauty of our countryside, warning that “once it has gone it has gone forever”.

“On the train or driving, you look out and June in England is transcendent with wonder. Without it we will go mad,” she says.

She urges people to get out of their cars on longer journeys and explore the beauty of our countryside.

“The tendency to holiday abroad is highly seductive and the weather draws people that way – but not to know how marvellous the Norfolk broads are, or the Cornish moors, or the Lake District? It is so wonderful.

“Wherever you are stop, and go and look at a church. The churchyard itself will be wonderful. Get out of the car, and breathe.” 

 

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