Cornwall’s china clay history boosts business in St Austell

A ceramics festival forms part of a plan to regenerate the town using its industrial heritage, finds Hazel Sheffield

Brickmaking workshops as part of St Austell's Whitegold festival (Oliver Udy)

Craft breweries are often an early sign of gentrification in the industrial districts of UK cities, colonising abandoned warehouses and bringing hipsters out of town to spend their cash. But in St Austell, on the south coast of Cornwall in between Plymouth and Falmouth, regeneration is on the mind of the family founders of the St Austell Brewery, one of the oldest businesses in town.

“With St Austell being our home we still feel a great obligation to play an active part in the well-being of the town and the hinterland,” says James Staughton, whose great-great-grandfather set up the brewery in 1851. “We hope that the local residents frequent our pubs, inns and hotels so we support events that put something back into the community that supports us in turn.”

On 21 September, St Austell will host the third annual Whitegold festival, an event that draws on the area’s china clay mining history and celebrates its many modern day ceramics artists. It will include the launch of a major international ceramics prize, with artists and collectives invited to submit ideas that use clay to inspire new perspectives and insights into place. The prize and the festival is part of an ambitious plan to reimagine St Austell, boosted by £1m in funding from the Government’s Coastal Communities Fund, which supports the economic development of places on the coast.

“We hope this will bring more people into the area and give it a greater sense of local identity,” says Dan James, development director of the nearby Eden Project. “We had this process where the purpose of St Austell wasn’t really recognised and we were trying to create a cultural reimagining of St Austell that differentiated it using ceramics and horticulture.”

St Austell is the largest town in Cornwall, but it suffers from a lack of identity compared to some of its neighbours like Falmouth, which is known for its art school, or Newquay, which is popular for extreme sports.

The giant biospheres of the Eden Project, which landed in a 160-year-old exhausted china clay quarry at nearby Bodelva in 2001, welcomed over one million visitors in the financial year ending March and its 20th million since it opened. Eden claims to have contributed £2m to the local economy, mostly through supply chains.

But there is a realisation among Eden executives and other business owners on the St Austell Bay economic forum (Sabef), a group of local business leaders that have joined together to promote economic growth in St Austell, that the proximity of Eden is not enough to lift the prospects of St Austell on its own.

“The idea is that one million people come to Eden every year and not enough of those people make the extra visit to the town centre,” James says. “How do we increase the profile of this great landscape? Because it’s not considered a tourism hotspot – not enough people come to the town centre and we want to buck that trend.”

Sabef has come up with twin regeneration plans that draw on the china clay mining history of the area and its newer identity for horticulture, based not only on Eden but on other nearby gardens including Tregrehan, Heligan and Pine Lodge.

Ten thousand ceramic tiles handmade by local residents are being made into a mosaic on a wall in the town centre and there are plans to create a wildflower corridor along the major road networks and along roundabouts and on strategic buildings. “You’ll start to see the creation of clay exhibits or garden installations that bring it all to life,” James says.

China clay was discovered in the St Austell area by William Cookworthy in the 18th century. It gradually overtook the mining of copper and tin as the main industry in the area after the metals suffered a fall in prices.

By the mid-19th century, 7,000 local people were employed in the local clay mining industry that supplied 50 per cent of world’s porcelain. But like many British post-industrial towns, St Austell went into rapid decline as business moved overseas. English China Clay was sold to Imerys, the French conglomerate, in 1999 and hundreds of jobs were lost as operations moved to Brazil.

The current Whitegold festival started as a pop-up festival in 2016 and has grown steadily over three years. “It’s about engaging with local people and trying to encourage pride in their heritage but also connecting across the UK and globally as well,” says curator Alex Murdin. “We’re still at the start of that journey but we are making progress.”

He notes that the local china clay museum has a new gallery space, a new workshop and an education space. Meanwhile the 18th century market house is being redeveloped as a space people in the arts. Regeneration plans include an idea for a clay trail around the old mines for walkers and cyclists.

“The pits were seen as a detractor, but we’re beginning to see how they can be used to draw tourists," Murdin says.

He believes that their efforts must start by engaging local people to take pride in their place first, before it can be effective at reaching tourists. “St Austell is a post-industrial town with the problems that go along with that,” he says. “We’re searching for a different story to tell people with china clay at its heart.”