A Brown Study: Two Pieces, Two Traditions, One Instinct
There is a moment in every charity shop run when your hand reaches for something before your brain has decided why. You are moving fast, scanning shelves, and something pulls. You pick it up, turn it over, and only then work backwards to understand what caught you. Lately, for me, that thing is almost always brown.
Not the wan beige of a tired bathroom suite. Not the muddy compromise of something that could not commit to a colour. The kind of brown that has depth: a dark maroon-chocolate glaze on a Burslem stoneware coffee pot; the warm red of Devon clay showing through an unglazed cottage jug from Barnstaple. Brown with intention. Brown with somewhere to be.
These two pieces arrived in the same week and ended up next to each other on the shelf, which is where the question started forming. A Gibson & Sons stoneware coffee pot from around 1920, made in Burslem at the heart of the Staffordshire Potteries, and a C.H. Brannam Royal Barum Ware terracotta cottage jug from Devon, circa 1930. Different towns, different traditions, different browns entirely. What they share is the thing that made me pick them up.
A Brown Study
The Gibson's pot
The Gibson's pot is industrial in the best sense. Gibson & Sons were a Burslem institution, known primarily for teapots, the kind of volume producer that kept the Potteries running through the early decades of the last century. This coffee pot is austere and a little severe: a tall cylinder of dark maroon stoneware with a heavily textured band around the lower half that provides grip and visual weight in equal measure. The upper section is smooth and glossy; the lower rough as bark. It is a two-tone treatment that is entirely functional in origin and ends up looking quietly considered. The metal flip lid, hinged and fitted with a ceramic knop, speaks to catering use, the kind of pot that lived on a hotel breakfast table or behind a station buffet counter. It was made to work, and it looks like it.
View the Gibson & Sons Stoneware Coffee Pot
The Brannam jug
Charles Hubert Brannam had been potting in Barnstaple since the 1870s, working with the red clay of North Devon in a tradition that stretches back at least seven hundred years. By the time this piece was made, the art pottery ambitions of the Victorian period had settled into something more plainly domestic: the Royal Barum Ware range, entirely hand-made, sold as cottage ware for cottage kitchens. The jug shows exactly this. The body is unglazed terracotta, the red-brown of Devon earth, smooth and slightly warm to the touch. The interior and the dipped rim carry a deep dark glaze that pools and breaks where it meets the unglazed body. Beautifully simple. No decoration to speak of. The form does the work.
View the C.H. Brannam Royal Barum Ware Cottage Jug
Two browns
Put them next to each other and the difference becomes obvious. Gibson's is the brown of industry: controlled, dense, a colour that absorbs light rather than reflecting it. Brannam is the brown of the ground itself: organic, variable, something that exists before anyone decided to make it a colour at all. One came from a slip-cast mould in a Staffordshire factory. The other came from a potter's hands and a North Devon hillside. Both of them ended up on a charity shop shelf, passed over, priced at nothing, waiting.
The lag
This is the thing about brown that keeps pulling at me. The decades-long design consensus that brown was bad, the colour of everything our parents were trying to leave behind, hollowed out a whole generation of brown objects. Serious stoneware, honest terracotta, the deep treacle glazes of British provincial pottery: all of it ended up priced at 50p or less. The people setting those prices were working from a script that is now out of date.
Brown is back, in the sense that the people who care about interiors are reaching for warmth and weight and something that feels made rather than manufactured. But the charity shops have not caught up yet, and that lag is where the interesting things live.