Early experimental porcelain production in seventeenth-century England: Dwight’s Fulham pottery (London)

John Dwight’s pottery at Fulham was one of the first English potteries to try to make porcelain in the seventeenth century. We analysed 11 sherds of John Dwight’s experimental pottery to better understand the production processes and differences with the earliest English porcelain factories. As we have little data on early porcelain in Britain, and few experimental pieces have been recovered, the Fulham experimental porcelain was studied by non-destructive SEM–EDX analyses. The results were then compared to those previously obtained from of a sample from the Chinese manufacturing centre of Dehua, and five samples of Fulham material analysed in 1986. Variation was found among the experimental pieces from Fulham, but overall, they share a similar composition, which is clearly different to that of the Dehua sample and distinctive from other English factories.