This section owes its existence almost entirely to the efforts of Peter Clegg, who spent a lot of time in the National Archives at Kew in the 1980s and subsequently collecting images of registered designs. It is a credit to how methodical he was, and the care he took writing descriptions of registered designs, that virtually no errors have been found in his listings. Peter started with the ‘new’ series of registration numbers in 1884, and stopped at around number 530,000 in 1909. There were some tile designs registered after 1909, even after the Copyright Act of 1911 meant that it was no longer necessary to register your design in order to assert ownership.
Pilkington’s in particular continued to register many designs after 1909, and Barry Corbett has generously allowed his archive of numbers and illustrations to be included in the TACS list.
There are bound to be some errors in the lists, especially in relation to an image attributed to a particular registration number. It isn’t unusual, particularly with Pilkington’s, to find a tile which has the wrong registration number on its back. Some of these errors are highlighted in the TACS data, others will come to light in the future.
Images of tiles with a registered design are available in many cases. Where these are not available, we have included an image taken from Peter Clegg’s notebooks. These are rough sketches but together with the written description should be enough to confirm the identity of a tile. Peter has donated his pile of close-written notebooks to TACS, it demonstrates the huge amount of careful work that went into his project.
Before 1884, tile designs that were registered have a ‘diamond’ mark with number and letter codes for the date of registration. Lists of these by date, manufacturer and type of ceramic have already been published, notably in ‘British Ceramics Marks’ by JP Cushion, Faber & Faber 1959; and the ‘New Handbook of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks’ by Geoffrey A Godden, Barrie & Jenkins, 1968. Additionally Michael Stratton did some work on tile and terracotta registrations in the 1980s, and Rob Higgins collected some information from the National Archive in 2019. In due course it is hoped that a complete database can be produced and verified, but at present it isn’t complete and there are inconsistencies between the various data sources that need ironing out.
