“Porcelain began about the year 1750. There is only one manufactory, which employs about seventy people. The clay is not of equal fineness with the foreign, but the workmanship exceeds it. The arts of drawing and engraving have much improved within these last thirty years. The improvements of the porcelain have kept pace with these. They adhere to nature in their designs, to which the Chinese have not attained. A dessert service of one hundred and twenty pieces was recently fabricated here for the Prince of Wales. The spot upon which this elegant building stands, which is internally replete with taste and utility, was once the freehold of my family. It cost £35, but the purchaser, my grandfather’s brother, being unable to raise more than £28, mortgaged it for £7. Infirmity, age, and poverty, obliged him to neglect the interest, when, in 1743, it fell into the hands of my father as heir-at-law, who, being neither able nor anxious to redeem it, conveyed away his right to the mortgagee for a guinea.” And again, in his MS. “History of the Hutton Family,” 1799,[8] he says, speaking of John Hutton:-- “He was the man who purchased the house east of St. Mary’s Bridge, now the China Works, for £35, but being master of only £28, mortgaged the premises to Mr. Crompton, a banker, for the other seven. He becoming old and poor, and inheriting the supineness of the Hutton family, suffered the trifling interest to remain unpaid till the mortgagee seized the premises. The freehold in 1743 fell into the hands of my father, as heir-at-law, who assigned over his interest to Mr. Crompton for a guinea.” The manufactory was situated on the Nottingham Road, near St. Mary’s Bridge, in a locality then named Suthrick, or Southwark. On its site, in 1845–6, the Roman Catholic nunnery of St. Marie, designed by Pugin, was erected, but this has now, like the China Works, become “a thing of the past”--the nunnery having been purchased by the Midland Railway Company, and taken down in 1863. Hutton’s remark as to this site being his patrimony, is very curious, and adds an increased interest to the locality. The very premises he speaks of were those first occupied for the making of porcelain, and, curiously enough, they were opposite to Lombe’s silk-mill, from which they were divided by the road and the broad expanse of water of the River Derwent.