In Stoke-on-Trent one balmy day this summer, a Victorian world unfurled at an earthenware manufacturer I had come to visit. Middleport Pottery, the Grade II*-listed home of Burleigh Pottery, built in 1888, is seemingly unchanged since then, as women mill around its cobbled walkways wearing patched crinoline skirts and poke bonnets, and men model timeworn top hats and darned waistcoats. An embarrassment of wooden stalls with a panoply of foodstuffs, including a rather fly-friendly table of fish, moulder in the midday sun, while an assortment of mismatched Victorian underwear hangs to dry.

The pottery has surrendered its photogenic aspects to a TV production crew, intent on making it an authentic, bustling 19th-century scene, but Burleigh’s story began about 40 years before this state-of-the-art manufactory was completed, in 1851, as Hulme Booth. When William Leigh and Frederick Rathbone Burgess took over in 1862, it became known as Burgess Leigh, and the abbreviated name, Burleigh, was adopted in 1903.

In 2010, it was acquired by British ceramics company Denby and, that same year, The Prince’s Regeneration Trust stepped in with a substantial £9 million sum to purchase and save the building from severe disrepair. The Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) visited the site in 2013, returning five more times. Since then, its history has been mixed, until it was recently threatened with closure. Sixty-two jobs at risk; the only pottery in the world to use underglaze tissue printing, whereby potters apply designs to vessels using tracing paper, its lengths almost hemming them in like a Victorian laundry. (Such is the commitment to this 1750s-born craft that one woman has an elaborate web of tattoos – taken from a Burleigh design – on her calves, which peeps out of her shorts as she works.)

In 2018, Bailey had given up his roles of chief creative officer and president of Burberry, where he had transformed the brand since 2001 (after stints at Gucci with Tom Ford, and Donna Karan), to focus on his all-enveloping private life. “I had always hoped to have children but never actually – certainly growing up as a young gay man in quite a tough part of Yorkshire – thought that would even be within the of possibility,” says Halifax-born Bailey, who is now based in Oxfordshire. “And then [I was] able to have a family and get married to a man [actor Simon Woods] and go on my Burberry adventure and all these things, these amazing, happy accidents.” Giving up his high-powered job gave him time to lavish on his girls, Iris and Nell, now in their pre-teens.

One spring Sunday afternoon this year, after his husband had departed for France to shoot a film for several weeks, Bailey was walking his dog Beckett with his children. He received a phone call from a friend, who told him the news that Denby had entered administration. “I knew the product,” says Bailey. “And I said, ‘I don’t have an emotional affinity with Denby. But let me look into it because maybe there’s more to it than I understand.’ I finished the walk and couldn’t stop thinking about it… I realised that Denby was the parent company for Burleigh. I’ve always Burleigh.” (At the age of 17, Bailey had worked for a wedding dress company in Hebden Bridge, just outside Halifax, “in one of those extraordinary buildings,” – so the industrial Victorian style of the 1880s Burleigh workshop was familiar to him.) By June, it was announced that Bailey had acquired the company, alongside a small group of private investors.

Jemma Baskeyfield, the brand marketing manager, retail manager and company historian who has been at the firm for 26 years, was practically the first person Bailey met at Burleigh. She educated him about every facet of the company, and the specific language of pottery making: the fettler, the jolly, the monkey’s tail, the sherd-ruck, the potter’s rot. “I think you were cleaning everything up as well, after everyone had gone,” remembers Bailey. “We do wear a few hats,” says Baskeyfield.

“Feeling the weight of a 175-year-old company and giving its best face to Christopher when he first visited was a huge responsibility. I gave it a decent stab,” she continues. “You did more than that,” replies Bailey. “You made me fall completely in love. I called Simon and said, ‘We’re putting our pension into a little pottery in Staffordshire.’”

“I just felt good here. I felt quite nurtured,” he says of his inauguration into the company, as we wander through its endless ateliers. “I grew up in a very post-industrial, historically thriving textile town, and the majority of businesses there were on their last legs.” Here, every employee has a unique skill, something that can only be done by hand. “Once, I heard the most beautiful sound, and I was told, ‘Shirley’s listening to the pings.’ She tings the piece she’s working on with another piece of pottery and can tell if there’s any air trapped in it.”

In a ground floor room is a Dickensian treasure trove of white plaster moulds, housed on floor-to-ceiling shelving. “Magical,” is how Bailey describes it. “I need to get everything digitised,” he says with a sigh. Archiving is a substantial future project. “We make things, but there’s never been a pause to say, ‘What do we have?’ And how can we make sure that we’re protecting things and using things? Because right now, it’s quite difficult to… find things. I’ve had quite a few projects where I just need to know, do we have this kind of a shape? This kind of a size? This kind of a vessel? And two days later, I’m still searching for it.”

The Arden design on this teacup has been part of Burleigh collections for more than 100 years.

They have a collection of more than 25,000 master moulds, a complete archive of engravings, which number more than 5,000, from across the company’s history, and all of the original engraved cylinders. “So basically, the tissue transfer process is where you get a copper cylinder, you hand-draw the design and then engrave it with a hammer and tools. So you’ve got two rollers and you put tissue through it, along with an ink,” explains Bailey, emphasising that the only thing that doesn’t come from within 100 miles is the tobacco tissue – the right consistency and weight – from France. “Then these very skilled people cut the printed tissue out, and they literally wrap the vessel, whatever it is, a teapot, a cup, a plate. And with a brush, they push the ink into what’s called biscuit, where the pot has gone through the kiln one time. The paper gets washed off leaving the print, which gets glazed and goes for another firing in the kiln. And that kind of firing changes the colour.”

Bailey had always thought that if he decided to have “another phase of life”, it would be in a big, tech-based – “because I love technology” – fashion company. And so it’s quite funny that the thing that actually made my heart sing is practically AI-proof because it can’t be replicated by technology.” He has plans to make the product – which is sought after by Soho House, William Morris gallery and Ralph Lauren – more eclectic. “We’re very botanical, we’re very flowers and leaves. How can that, kind of, evolve? The patterns and colours, I think, can continue to have creativity instilled in them.”

There are similarities between the worlds of fashion and pottery. “I remember, when I was 16, taking a coach to Paris from Halifax because I wanted to get into the Mugler and Chanel shows,” Bailey recalls. “I was a 16-year-old snotty-nosed kid, not dressed the way that you should be dressed for that kind of audience. I was very naïve, but I found it a world. And the way it’s changed, that kind of of fashion – it’s just what’s happened in much of the ceramics industry.”

At Burleigh, the hand still sings. “I really feel, in some ways, it’s this extraordinary 175-year-old start-up,” says Bailey, “and I’m enjoying that. I’m enjoying rolling up my sleeves. At Burberry, it was just an enormous responsibility. And I feel that here, but actually, I’m starting at the bottom. My whole mantra is: preserve this, but just make sure that we put in really good systems underneath.”

Hailing from a working-class background, Bailey views his hard work as a badge of honour. “My parents were grafters and they instilled that in me,” he explains. “But my girls… I stopped working when they were very young. I felt concerned that they were seeing me always being available and my purpose was solely to look after them and our life and our family. Parenting is an incredible skill and something that I’m very much learning. But professionally, I wasn’t really doing anything. And so I feel really excited and kind of slightly relieved that the girls are seeing me doing something that I’m loving. I’m not being paid for it, but that’s OK. One day it might happen.”

“I’m working very late at night and very early in the morning – on every facet. The operational side, the team side, the where-to-invest side, the rebuilding a website, the creative voice. I’m feeling energised by it.” He looks around the pottery’s workshops. “The team is really generous,” he adds. “They’re very proud. And so many of the amazing people here, their grandparents and parents were in the potteries. And so, it’s not so much a job or a vocation. It is a culture.”

At the end of the day, when he considers the Burleigh world, “I feel joyful,” says Bailey.

Set design: Tara Holmes.