Hornsea Pottery Nostalgia Weekend

August Bank Holiday weekend was the Hornsea Pottery Nostalgia event up at Freeport. Following the one day success of last year's event, this year it ran for the 3 days.
I set off bright and early on the Saturday morning, running with the theory the early bird catches the worm! For a long time I have had 2 main things on my Hornsea wish list, those being a cat cruet set and an Aphrodite vase, both John Clappison designs.


My luck was in, a great selection of items were on display and I initially whizzed around looking for treasures. The very last stall I saw, coincidentally the stall of Dorothy who is HPC & RS membership secretary, had the cat, fish & owl cruets. What joy, I couldn't resist as the cats were smiling at me in beautiful condition and I did get them for a better price than I've seen them go for on Ebay so I was very happy and I think Dorothy was pleased they would go to a good home.

It would probably take years to stumble across the cruets in a charity shop so it's nice that I can enjoy them now. These cruets are from 1966-67 and were made as gift sets for Boots.


Here are some of the other stalls, it was fantastic looking at the pots and hearing bits of history about pieces from their owners. Lots of lovely tea sets but no Aphrodite vases, however I made contact with a seller who can probably sell me one from his collection. Think I'll have to save up a bit before that!

The museum were there with a good selection of ceramics and also pieces of original artwork in the form of watercolour paintings of some designs, plus some moulds this one is Concept.

One final purchase, very cheap as it is a slight second with kiln mark on the back, is this lovely Leo Lion mug. I think it is from the Jungle Mug range of about 1979. Love the way newspaper clippings have been collaged together to create the design.

As usual experts were on hand to offer advice to people popping in with their treasures and much excitement occurred when a lady came in with a Mermaid dish, it is believed that only 12 of these were ever made back in the 50's so hardly anyone had seen one. An interesting end to a great day, I hope the rest of the weekend proved as popular.