After leaving school I worked for three very different potters for two years before setting up my first workshop with the help of a New Craftsman Grant awarded by the then, Crafts Advisory Committee in 1975. This enabled me to build my first kiln and buy some equipment to set up my new workshop and begin what has become a long and not always easy relationship with clay. It was at time when functional pots for the kitchen were in great demand and that is what I started to make .

A move to West Wales three years later saw a sharp decline in sales of domestic ware, and in order to survive as a potter, pay the mortgage and support our new family I took whatever work I could get, Bird Feeders for the RSPB and Oxfam Trading to sell in their mail order catalogues. This turned out to be an experiece I would never want to repeat. I made many thousands of these things, little knowing that the tedious repetition, month in month out, would give me the best grounding in the skill of throwing, and enable me to work with confidence later, on pots both challenging in scale and quantity.

In 1982 we moved back to Shropshire where I had been brought up, buying a redundant village school with plenty of space and even more work to be done before we were able to get going again with the pottery. A change to making garden pots was a way of getting underway, testing new kilns and having something to sell quickly. In a very short period of time we had built up a considerable number of regular customers and wholesale outlets. For the first time in many years we were able to take holidays with our four young boys, with the sales left in the capable hands of my father in law, who would try and sell more pots every year he was left in charge!

1995 saw a return to making high-fired stoneware between commissions for garden pots, and a chance to start woodfiring, something I had always longed to do. Long breaks from stoneware in order complete garden pot contracts meant that few people had seen much of my work - something this web site is trying to change.

In 2001 I completed my last commission for Powis Castle, five huge niche pots to sit in five stone reveals on the top terrace of this wonderful garden, Do you know, that out of the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the garden, not one person has ever said to me “ I saw your pots at Powis Castle “! So in 2002 I began where I started out, making stoneware pots but in a very different market !