I love the 1930s period of English ceramics when factories such as Poole Pottery achieved a perfection in their colour palette and a poise in their shapes that in my opinion has never been bettered.

When John Lewis asked me to design ceramics for them I therefore drew on those roots and presented them with the concept of a celebration of a distinctly English style which we made in the thinnest, lightest porcelain just like in days of old.

My wife Ali created the colourways so 2 Tone (with a nod to the music of my youth) was a true marriage of shape and colour.

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Simplicity is a challenging friend to keep but a perfect companion when you can find it!

For me, visiting Stoke on Trent for the first time in the early 1990s was to be assailed by a great sea of pottery that mostly I found hard to make friends with – forms and patterns that I couldn’t connect with let alone understand the people who could?

I therefore found myself on a personal mission to find a way of communicating my own style that would contrast with what I saw around me and maybe if I was lucky connect with a customer that felt that same.

It was a tricky process and I needed to learn how to get the precise details that I designed to be moulded not to be erased in the traditional sponging process, or how to apply black glaze so that it was flawlessly smooth (and didn’t contaminate the whole factory which would have put me in the nearest Stoke jail!)?

Basalt was the result of these early trials and errors with some indulgence of my whims by the skill and support of local ‘heroes’ such as Malcolm Burden. It was truly perplexing at first but eventually it came good and in its own way turned into quite the market leader.

In fact, it was the key that unlocked a much bigger door than I could imagine because it brought me to the attention of Wedgwood and all that followed …so it became known as ‘Basalt’ in honour of someone I then learned about properly – Old Josiah himself.

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When I opened my first shop at Harvey Nichols back in 1997 I happened to meet a talented young designer called Keeley Traae who invited me to visit her studio at Wedgwood.

I had never been to Wedgwood before but Keeley and her team made me super welcome and put the factory at my disposal to do whatever I wanted but with the outline brief to ‘re-invent Jasperware’ – their iconic blue & white collection.

There was a brilliant archivist at the Wedgwood Museum on site so I did my research on old Josiah himself and was intrigued to discover how innovative, entrepreneurial and fashion-aware he was – truly a man ahead of his time and as I read about him I felt inspired to try and emulate his achievements.

I asked myself what Josiah would do if he were with us today and I decided that he would design much more contemporary things than the company was then known for. The result was a collection of black and cream objects of exquisite quality with perfect detailing and a point of view which is pure modernist.

The collection launched in 1999 to rave reviews and it sold all over the world from Japan to Korea and the USA. A witty advertising campaign was created by The Partners in London with the strap-line “Wedgwouldn’t…?” which seemed to sum up the delight and surprise that the designs triggered.

I like to think that the project helped the company to find a new direction in the contemporary world and I truly hope that Josiah would approve if he were around today?!

My designs are themselves now featured in the new Wedgwood Museum and meanwhile Keeley has gone from strength to strength to deliver some of the best and most successful Wedgwood designs of the past 20 years.

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