Cornwall’s china clay history boosts business in St Austell

A ceramics festival forms part of a plan to regenerate the town using its industrial heritage, finds Hazel Sheffield

Brickmaking workshops as part of St Austell's Whitegold festival (Oliver Udy)

Craft breweries are often an early sign of gentrification in the industrial districts of UK cities, colonising abandoned warehouses and bringing hipsters out of town to spend their cash. But in St Austell, on the south coast of Cornwall in between Plymouth and Falmouth, regeneration is on the mind of the family founders of the St Austell Brewery, one of the oldest businesses in town.

“With St Austell being our home we still feel a great obligation to play an active part in the well-being of the town and the hinterland,” says James Staughton, whose great-great-grandfather set up the brewery in 1851. “We hope that the local residents frequent our pubs, inns and hotels so we support events that put something back into the community that supports us in turn.”

On 21 September, St Austell will host the third annual Whitegold festival, an event that draws on the area’s china clay mining history and celebrates its many modern day ceramics artists. It will include the launch of a major international ceramics prize, with artists and collectives invited to submit ideas that use clay to inspire new perspectives and insights into place. The prize and the festival is part of an ambitious plan to reimagine St Austell, boosted by £1m in funding from the Government’s Coastal Communities Fund, which supports the economic development of places on the coast.