The Leach Pottery, founded by Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada in 1920, is the most historically important ceramics studio in Britain. Its influence on the development of studio pottery worldwide is difficult to overstate: the idea of the artist-craftsperson working with hand-built or wheel-thrown forms, drawing on Japanese and Korean traditions, began here and spread through the English-speaking world.
The pottery was restored and opened as a museum in 2008. You can see the original kilns — one of the earliest Japanese-style anagama kilns in the Western world — alongside a permanent display of pots by Leach, Hamada, and generations of their students. The studio still functions, and resident potters work on the premises. There is a gallery selling contemporary ceramics by artists working in the Leach tradition, and the shop is one of the best places in Cornwall to buy genuinely good handmade pots.