Kingsbridge Cookworthy Museum

A Vision Built on Local Pride

In the market town of Kingsbridge, in Devon's South Hams, the Kingsbridge Cookworthy Museum stands at the top of Fore Street. Its founding is a story of local determination. The town's Old Grammar School, built and endowed by Thomas Crispin in 1670, had become derelict, and Mrs Evelyn Northcott persuaded English China Clays Ltd to rescue the building and found a museum to collect and record the social history of the area. The museum opened there in 1972.

The museum was named after William Cookworthy (1705–1780), who was born in Kingsbridge. A Quaker, a pharmacist and, in the museum's words, a polymath, he was the first in Britain to discover how to make hard-paste porcelain like that imported from China, found china clay in Cornwall, and in 1768 patented his porcelain and opened a works in Plymouth. Yet the museum is not only about one man: it tells the story of the people, industries and heritage of the South Hams.

Preserving the Fabric of the South Hams

Today the museum’s galleries combine permanent displays with special exhibitions about how the people of the area have lived, worked and played over many generations. One room is given to Cookworthy himself, and the museum displays various pieces of his porcelain, among them a moulded, fluted sauceboat with underglaze blue decoration from the Plymouth factory years (1768–1770). In 1770 Cookworthy moved the factory to Bristol in partnership with Richard Champion, and he retired in 1773.

Equally important is the museum's collection of more than 30,000 photographs, from the 1870s to the present day, which visitors can browse on a computer kiosk and order copies of. Its Local Heritage Resource Centre holds local documents and microfilm copies of local newspapers from 1855 onwards, for anyone researching their family or their town.

The museum also shows the area's farming roots. The Farm Gallery, in the walled garden behind the main building, holds machinery and equipment from a cider press to hand tools, including farm equipment such as wagons that local engineering workshops built for the narrow lanes and steep hills of the South Hams. Domestic life has its place too: the Costume Gallery shows dresses, hats, shoes and accessories, including many nineteenth-century dresses, and the Victorian kitchen keeps the huge cast-iron range, made at the local foundry in Duke Street, on which meals were cooked for up to 60 boarders at the school and for the headmaster's household.

Whispers in the Wood Panelling

History at the Kingsbridge Cookworthy Museum is not confined to glass cabinets; it is etched into the building itself. The Cookworthy Room is the grammar school's old schoolroom, where generations of boys carved their initials into the wood-panelled walls. Today it holds a permanent exhibition on how Kingsbridge and the surrounding villages have developed over the centuries.

A Local Museum with a National Story

The museum's story reaches beyond Devon: William Cookworthy, born in the town, made the first true hard-paste porcelain in England. For the people of Kingsbridge, it keeps the record of their own town and of the villages around it.

The museum is run by a small committee with one full-time paid administrator and a team of volunteers and stewards, without whom, the museum says, it could not function. Behind it stands the William Cookworthy Museum Society, a community benefit society registered for exclusively charitable purposes.

Visiting the Museum

The museum is at 108 Fore Street, Kingsbridge. Opening times, prices and events are on the Kingsbridge Cookworthy Museum website.

This article was written by EachMoment, which digitises old photographs, films and tapes, as part of a series on local heritage.