Ironstone China - a Brief History

During the 1800’s in Staffordshire England, in an effort to cut costs and increase business, many porcelain manufacturers and potters were trying to find a substitute for porcelain. Porcelain at the time was both expensive and hard to export because of breakage.  It was also difficult to mass produce the beautiful porcelain pieces of the time.  So the quest for many of the potters was to find a substitute that was easily mass produced to cut costs and to find a durable substitute for porcelain, which could be easily exported to Australia and the new colonies in the United States.