Welcome to our December issue, and a very happy Christmas to everyone. We have been very busy in the last couple of months in the factory at Fishponds. We were honoured to be commissioned to prepare and produce a Presentation Plate for Her Royal Highness Princess Anne, the Princess Royal, when she visited Bristol recently to open the Centre for the Deaf. [full story]
Alsoon our agenda is completing a huge order for the Lord Mayor of Bristol, for a set of wine glasses for the Mansion House, to be used at official
functions. Each glass will be engraved with the city’s coat of arms, and they look very splendid, this will be a wonderful advertisement for the city in the years to come. We are delighted to have been selected to represent the Bristol glass industry and hope that our products will compare favourably with the best examples from the eighteenth centuries. [full story]
Speaking of historic glass in Bristol, we visited the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery again recently to admire their examples of glass from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It must be one of the significant collections of glass in the country. We have access to a private collection of historic Bristol Blue Glass, including a signed piece of Lazarus glass, and many other items from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We use it to compare our own products, to make sure that we maintain the finest standards and traditions of this much loved glass in our present-day production. We pride ourselves on using the same formulae for our raw materials and the same techniques for our designs which would have been known to Isaac and Jacob Lazarus over two hundred years ago.
The Company Secretary F. E. Burroughes has just come back from a visit to some of our customers in Holland. Hogendoorn and Kaufmann is the principal glass shop in Amsterdam, now they are stocking our new ‘Silverleaf’ range as well as chosen items of the Silver Ultimate Luxury range. These will compliment the ranges of the world famous Daum, Baccarat, Lalique, and Kosta Boda glass, for which Hogendoorn and Kaufmann are the Netherlands stockists. We are privileged to be chosen to join such exalted company.
One of our stockists in Holland is right on the Dutch-German border, and they report that our blue glass has been admired by many German shoppers, who have not seen much Bristol Blue glass before, despite the fact that Prussia was the historic source of the cobalt which we still use to create the wonderful vibrant colour. So we are pleased that some of our glass is ‘going back home’ to where some of its raw materials originally came from.
We will be welcoming a party of German visitors to our Fishponds workshops in the coming weeks. They are all teachers, and staying a week in the city. As well as visiting schools in the Bristol area, they are going to spend a morning with us to have an insight into a traditional Bristol industry, and take home a souvenir of their time with us. [full story]
Finally, in what has been a bumper month of
events, once again a very merry Christmas to all our customers and readers, and
we hope to see you again in the New Year, when we will have more great news for
you.
Best wishes from Steve, Jim, Angela and Ben, the team at Fishponds.
