A friend once said to me, when she was at a point of crisis, ‘Everything will be alright once I have my blue and white life’. And without knowing what she meant, I knew exactly what she meant.
Until then, I hadn’t given much thought to this calm combination of colours. Soon, I began to see it everywhere: fabric, china, wallpaper, ink. As a student, I sought out cheap, pretty cups and bowls in my local seconds shop. The best things were the noodle bowls in blue and white and the delicate mugs (translucent in places, and some of them with little lids). I graduated to those lovely plates with blue fish on them that you find in Chinese supermarkets (and where they shared a carrier bag with enormous boxes of jasmine green tea). Then, when I had a proper job and could afford it, I let myself have the occasional piece of Spode Blue Italian. Blue and white, blue and white…
It’s hardly surprising that particular pairing of colours appeals to us so much. It has a long and distinguished pedigree. Blue glaze was used in ancient Mesopotamia to mimic the colour of lapis lazuli. Cobalt blue (a compound: cobalt silicate or cobalt aluminate) gave that deep, beautiful colour to Islamic pottery and to Chinese ceramics, as the two cultures borrowed designs and styles back and forth from one another along the sea route between them.
It wasn’t purely an aesthetic choice – cobalt blue glaze is one of the only colours that holds true under the high-temperature firing needed for porcelain – and by the time other similarly resilient glazes were developed, Chinese blue and white pottery had set off a craze. England fell especially hard, and the potteries of Staffordshire began to produce Willow pattern, a European take on a Chinese style of design, supposed to tell the story of star-crossed lovers.
William Morris’s beautiful leaf and flower designs almost always came in blue and white as well as in his signature green. The last century has seen a chunkier take on the colourway, with T.G. Green’s Cornishware is probably the most famous. Its bold, happy stripes were so named because they reminded an employee of the colour of Cornish skies and beaches.
Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent were key to all of this: the home of British ceramics, until it became cheaper to produce in the far east. But now, Stoke is beginning to see its potteries working again, not least thanks to Emma Bridgewater, whose cobalt blue stars are a bright, modern take on an old classic. If you’re lucky in a secondhand shop or on ebay, you might even be able to run one of her lovely blue chicken bowls or mugs to ground.
My favourite of all, though, has to be Burleigh Pottery’s delicate designs. There are lovely, rich blues (Blue Arden and Blue Calico) and softer ones too (Blue Asiatic and Blue Felicity). The one I saw first, and still have an old, cracked mug of, is Blue Regal, which sports handsome, preening peacocks that look as though they are about to step off the surface and strut across your table.
When I was growing up, blue and white china was a bit of a grannyish thing to use. It’s still something you can pick up fairly easily in charity shops. The nostalgia craze struck, and now, blue and white is all the rage again, albeit in a mismatched, wildflowers-in-a-jar way that I think would have horrified those very proper ladies who had a matching set of Spode Blue Italian for their kitchen dresser.
My own love of blue and white has now spilled out into striped fabric and nautical-looking tops. And, and much more ruinously, into a love of Delft tiles and those that came after them. I like to have one or two about, just to look at, or to use as mats for cups. And I love to go and see them in situ: a wall of Delft in an old kitchen, or William Morris’s beautiful fireplace tiles at Kelmscott. In fact, my thing for tiles is making me gradually more adventurous. Blue and white is lovely, but what about some green? Or that wonderful brickish red you see sometimes? Or those full on, Pugin-style ecclesiastical tiles with the cobalt blue background, glowing like the robes of the Virgin Mary in a medieval painting?
Maybe. Maybe one day. But for now, blue and white make everything alright. Together, they are peaceful, clean, quiet, reassuring, traditional and also modern, crisp and also soft. Ticking fabric, old-fashioned china, flowers and stripes. All of it is right in blue and white, the colours of sea and sky.
