Interview: Ken Stradling

The Bristol Guild needs little introduction for anyone who’s meandered up Park Street and found themselves sucked into the handsome Georgian building, dazzled by its large, bright and attractively furnished shop windows. Established in 1908, originally as a guild in its true sense for local craftsmen to share their knowledge and sell their wares, the Guild has evolved over the last century into the mini department store it is today, still operating as a showcase for carefully selected and well-crafted design pieces.

One of the key figures in the Guild’s latter history is Ken Stradling, who joined as assistant manager after the war in 1948, becoming the store’s managing director 17 years later. Travelling the world in search of the next standout piece of ceramics, art or furniture to sell at the Bristol Guild, Ken at the same time quite unintentionally began to amass a personal collection which after 60 years plus now totals over 2,000 artefacts.

“I never intended to set up a collection,” he reveals. “It’s just things I’ve bought over the years, really, both to furnish my own home and as managing director of the Guild, travelling extensively, especially in Scandinavia. When I saw something I liked myself I would buy it for the home. I just like lovely things around me – that’s always how I bought.”

Those 2,000 pieces – ranging from a 1950s Gio Ponti chair, light as a feather yet immensely sturdy, to an Eric Ravilious mug produced by Wedgwood – are housed both in Ken’s own home and over three floors at 48 Park Row, just behind the Bristol Guild. It is here at the Park Row address that members of the public are welcome to look round a section of the collection and even get up close to it, sitting on the chairs and touching the whisper-thin glassware.

Downstairs on the ground floor, a series of exhibitions – typically three or four a year – presents a curated selection of the collection. The whitewashed stone walls and large windows provide the ideal backdrop to let the ceramics and glassware sing out from their temporary shelves, each numbered with a corresponding description on laminated sheets which you’re encouraged to take as you look around.

The current exhibition What Modern Was focuses on vintage design from 1935-1975 – now the height of desirability in our vintage-obsessed age, yet once the very apex of modernity. Amongst the many beautifully crafted pieces, many of which would have been familiar sights in our grandparents’ homes, are a white sycamore veneer desk and chair designed by the architect Marcel Breuer and manufactured by P.E. Gane in Bristol in 1935, a Totem coffee pot designed by Susan Williams-Ellis in 1963 and manufactured by Portmeirion Pottery (see below), and an Encore cup and saucer designed in 1966 by A.H. Woodfull, featured in Design magazine that same year with this prescient description “…should remove the last vestiges of prejudice against the use of plastics for tableware.”

Above this room are two further floors containing more of Ken’s impressive wares, arranged in a charmingly hugger-mugger style. It’s clear that more room is required to give the collection space to breathe, and this is exactly what Ken hopes to achieve over the next few years with his ambitious plan to extend across the front of the Guild car park.

Has Ken ever regretted a purchase? “I’ve never regretted anything I’ve bought. I’ve regretted things I didn’t buy. We used to be one of the main agents for Lucy Rie, the well-known ceramicist. I never kept any of her work because I thought, ‘I know her, I’ll get a bit more later on’. The last piece I sold was a bowl – for £25, I think. A similar bowl has just sold for £4,500.” He stresses, though, that he’s always chosen pieces purely for their functionality, beauty and craftsmanship – never for their financial value.

Good design, Ken believes, “has to be functional – but that’s only half of it. It also has to please the eye, and this is why here, for example, we have set up as a study group – because nothing here is in cases, you can touch everything. If occasionally someone drops anything, well, that’s life isn’t it?”

What Modern Was runs until March 30 at the Ken Stradling Collection – open Wednesdays 10am-4pm and Saturday March 12 11am-3pm. Admission is free. For more information visit www.stradlingcollection.org

Main photo: Ken Stradling, with 1950s Gio Ponti chair to left of picture