A seamless blend of Scandinavian design and English craftsmanship
North Devon offers fabulous coastal and country scenery, cream teas, a slower pace of life, and is also the place where beautiful Scandinavian inspired glassware is produced by a team of highly skilled English craftspeople. Dartington Glass, rebranded Dartington Crystal in the late 1980s, produces stunning ranges of carefully created handmade glassware sold in the UK and exported to over 50 countries.
In 1962, the Dartington Hall Trust based in Totnes initially wanted to establish a ceramics factory where local people could be employed. When Frank Thrower, former Head of Sales at Portmeirion Pottery, was approached by one of the Trust’s Directors Peter Sutcliff, it was he who persuaded the Trust to build a glass factory instead of venturing into ceramics. Prior to his position at Portmeirion, Frank had been employed as a salesman for seven years by J Wuidart & Co Ltd, a company successfully importing Scandinavian-made glass to the UK. During his period of employment, Frank had worked closely with Ronald Stennett-Wilson, who at the time was one of Britain’s greatest glass designers, designing glass for Scandinavian glassworks to produce. Frank had also started getting his own designs made in Sweden to sell in the UK.
Travelling to Stockholm in 1964, Frank interviewed Eskil Vilhelmsson, who at the time was manager of a Swedish glassworks. This meeting resulted in Eskil coming to Devon in September that year and accepting the position of factory manager at the new glassworks site located in Torrington, North Devon. Once appointed, Eskil brought many skilled Scandinavian glass blowers to Devon, who then trained local employees.
With the newly formed Dartington Glass opened in 1967, and Frank appointed as their first Sales Director and Designer, it took four years before the hand-crafted glass products became established. When orders flooded in it then presented more challenges as their production capabilities could not cope. As a consequence, glassworks in the UK, Sweden and Norway were used to support production.
Early Dartington glass had been made using the relatively inexpensive production method of soda-lime-silica glass. However, production methods in later years turned to producing lead crystal, the process which remains today.
Until his death in 1987, as the sole designer for almost twenty years, Frank produced over 700 innovative and popular designs and received several prestigious awards. Several of his signature ranges remain in production today. One of Frank’s original designs, the Sharon Collection, was included by the Victoria & Albert Museum for their 100 Best Ever Products exhibition.
A year before Frank’s death a young graduate designer from the Royal College of Art, Hilary Green, won a Dartington-sponsored RSA bursary and went to work at the factory alongside her mentor. Now she is Head Designer and responsible for working alongside the highly skilled craftspeople to bring her 3-D designs to life.
“When I went to work at Dartington and learn from Frank Thrower, I fell in love with the scary, frightening molten glass that does wonderful things, but you can only learn what it does by working with it and feeling it,” says Hilary. “At College we were encouraged to create one-off sculptures, but I wanted to design my products for mass production. The majority of glassware is machine-made but at Dartington Crystal we continue to use handmade methods which are centuries old”, she explains.
“One of my greatest challenges as a designer is to create designs that cannot be mass produced by machine production, so I have to focus on each item’s handmade elements. The range of flower bottles which have become one of our best-selling ranges was one such example. I had to fight hard with New Product Development to get them produced. The brightly coloured bottle shape vases in various shapes and jewel-like colours have hand stamped designs on their fronts. They look good either as an individual vase or grouped as a collection.”
Hilary goes on to add: “When you drink out of a handmade glass you can feel the quality and the glass brings out the best of what you are drinking or displaying either in a vase or beautiful handblown bowl. The items we make are designed to be used and enjoyed and our designs still retain a minimalist aesthetic beauty defining the company’s enduring signature style of blending Scandinavian inspired design with English craftsmanship.
Dartington Crystal is the only large-scale crystal producer in the UK, and over the years whilst we continue to use traditional manufacturing methods, sustainability has become an essential part of the Dartington story. Nowadays, recently installed electric furnaces run alongside gas-fired ones, creating a greener and more flexible way forward. The new furnaces are used to melt lead free crystal. A further electric furnace was commissioned in January 2026 for Dartington Crystal’s Visitor Centre Studio, and this is just one further step in the company’s plans for a more sustainable future. We have also reduced wastage and many pieces we make are made from up to 50% recycled glass. Not only are we using a more energy-efficient production process overall, but we have also implemented greener packaging solutions.”
Visitors to the glassworks in Torrington can book to be part of the factory experience and watch the process. Raw materials of silica sand, lead oxide, potash and soda ash plus other organic compounds are blended together with 10% of crushed crystal (known as cullet) taken from a previous ‘batch’ of glass production, then heated in clay pots and placed in furnaces overnight. These reach a temperature of 1,400oC. By the early hours of the morning the temperature is lowered to 1,100oC at which point the glass is taken from the clay pot and used for that day’s production.
New collections recently launched include Artisan, a coloured giftware lead-free collection made using the new electric furnaces; Aurea, a recent wine suite; and the Flower Jars which are the most recent incarnation of the Flower Bottles.
The factory tour enables visitors to watch the entire process from gathering molten glass from the furnace, to blowing and shaping before the finishing process is undertaken. Once completed each item is washed and dried by hand before the Dartington backstamp is etched into the base after final inspection. The pieces are then labelled with the famous Dartington brand logo sticker and carefully packed into boxes for despatch or to be displayed in the Dartington Crystal on-site shop.
Image: Andy Popham
