Collection: Royal Albert China

Royal Albert English bone china

Royal Albert china is fine bone china and has been produced in England since 1896. Browse 100's of Royal Albert china items and patterns Royal Albert china remains one of the most popular of the bone china manufacturers in England. Old Country Roses is one of the most popular Royal Albert china patterns, having been made since the 1962 and is still in production today.

Browse our selection below of top quality preloved Royal Albert china for sale online below. We ship worldwide. If you are looking for a particular piece of Royal Albert china, that is showing as out of stock, please contact us as we may have it in stock awaiting listing.

A short history of Royal Albert china

Royal Albert china was originally produced in the Albert pottery works Longton Royal Albert Crown China was a brand of Thomas C Wild and Co. The Royal Albert China works were acquired in 1917 along with a string of other producers including Roslyn China Ltd, Chapmans (Longton) Ltd, and Shore & Coggins Ltd (1918), and by 1919 Wilds operated 15 English pottery factories and a string of English bone china brands. By 1935 the Royal Albert Crown China and TCW branding had developed into Royal Albert Bone China.

In 1964 T C Wild & Co was bought by the Pearson Group and then merged with Lawleys Ltd to form Allied English Potteries Ltd, but Wild was allowed to operate almost independently, and Royal Albert China continued as a leading china brand of the company. T. C. Wild & Sons Ltd continued production of their iconic Royal Albert China at the Edensor works, throughout the 1960's and in 1970 T C Wild was renamed Royal Albert Ltd. In 1972 The Royal Doulton Group acquired the Pearson Group and all its subsidiaries. Production of Royal Albert China was transferred to St Mary's Works until it closed in 1998.

Between 1998 and 2002 Royal Albert china production was transferred to other works including factories in Indonesia, so not all Royal Albert china is in fact English!  In 2005 Wedgwood took over the Royal Doulton group and the Royal Albert China Brand. Wedgwood china itself went into receivership in 2008, the current brand owners are WWRD Holding Ltd. 

How can you tell if Royal Albert china was sold as a factory second?

The factory marked a proportion of the production as seconds after the final kiln firing, by removing a section of the pictorial factory stamp with a drill. This is sometimes quite subtle and other times a scratched drill mark across the stamp is very evident. below are some examples of what to check for.

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On some occasions careful examination of the china will reveal a slight fault or flaw in the transfer or molding of the piece, but even as experienced dealers, this is not always clear, and there is a suspicion, particularly on post 1972 pieces that the factory may have been purposely marking a percentage of the production as seconds to enable a secondary, lower cost mass market for the china, thus maintaining production volumes and maintaining the price of the 1st quality pieces through the high end retailers.

This remains speculation, but the difficulty in spotting any reason for the majority of seconds to have been selected as such, means collectors should not be too fussy or upset if a proportion of a set has second factory stamps. From the front, it may be impossible to tell.