Ricardia (Richards Tiles Ltd)

Ricardia art pottery produced by the Richards tile factory in the late 1920s / into 1930s.

http://www.markhillpublishing.com/ricardia/
plenty of info on Mark Hill's blog

Some additions to what is said on the blog mentioned above might be helpful so here goes.

The company that became the Richards Tile Co. Ltd. in 1931 had started life as Edward Corn in Burslem in 1837, becoming W&E Corn in 1850 and then changing its name to The Henry Richards Tile Co Ltd in 1903 when it moved to larger premises, the Pinnox Works in Tunstall, after a previous move to Longport from Burslem.

Up until its move to Tunstall the company had produced general earthenware as well as tiles but in 1903 production was exclusively tiles apart from a small quantity of sanitary ware produced for Edward Johns & Co, who were a sister company. This ceased in 1925.

The demand for the company's tiles increased during the 1920s and a brand new additional factory, the Brownhills Works, was designed and built for them in 1933 and opened in early 1934. This was a short distance from the Pinnox Works where production was continued.

Ricardia Ware seems to have been made in the Recesso department of the Pinnox Works and the glazes were the same or very similar to the WM (wall mottle) glazes used on some of the companies tiles in the 1930s. These glazes contained lead oxides and were banned from 1947, as they caused lead poisoning in workers exposed during production.

Besides vases the range certainly included memo pads, paper weights and book ends and it seems as if they were given to the company's agents, customers and factory visitors as promotion aids rather than as a retail range.

The best local information suggests that they were made from the early 1930s but that production was fairly short lived due to a change in fashion from vases with glaze effects to painted wares by Clarice Cliff, Susie Cooper and the like. That doesn't mean that some items were not made in the late 1930s but the banning of the glazes in 1947 would certainly have called a halt to production.