There has been a pottery at Chessell on the Isle of Wight since the 1970’s and in 2003 Pottery Café moved in.

The spacious studio seats over 50 people and is popular throughout the season for visitors making mementoes of their visit to the Island and Islanders creating special gifts as well as capturing baby’s hand and footprints.

If you are holidaying on the Island, paint your pottery early in the week to enable you to collect your finished pottery at the end of your holiday. If you don’t have time to make it back to us, we can arrange to post your pottery home to you.

Paint an item of our own hand-made earthenware or a piece of beautiful Emma Bridgewater pottery – exclusively available from us. The pottery is a lovely cream colour; it is carefully hand-dipped in glaze and fired for you to collect a few days later.

One of our friendly Studio Assistants will show you how to paint pottery freehand or using our own hand-cut ‘decorating sponges’ – everything from hearts and stars, to farm animals, dinosaurs, butterflies and flowers. You can stay as long as you like and pop to the Café for refreshments as often as you like!

Chessell Ware- The process of slip casting is a long one! To make Earthenware pottery, liquid clay is hand poured into moulds, cut out, dried to leather-hard, sponged and fettled and then fired to biscuit before it is ready to decorate.We make around 15,000 items of our own earthenware pottery each year, using a slip casting process – the pottery is then either used as biscuit-ware (blanks) in our studios for customers to paint, themselves or decorated by our own production team to sell in the Gift Barn.

The strawberry range is probably our most popular design – it is used to serve our award winning Cream Teas in the Courtyard Café – and is available to buy from our Gift Barn.