wheel of fortune house chinese restaurant

He’s come a long way since those north London days. Setting up a studio in his sister’s house in Islington, he started selling. Seeking a change, he returned to London and went back to the wheel – where, naturally, he found the answer. It was like I was addicted.” Returning to the mountains, he continued working as a chef and operations manager until life in Switzerland – “too perfect, too many rules”– started to get him down. He was a mature – and somewhat depressed – student when one day he wandered into a studio looking for something to do. George came to his craft – as you might guess – unexpectedly. “I think it’s also something to do with the tradition of blue-and-white ceramics: delftware, Chinese porcelain, ancient Persian pieces… I like feeling part of that tradition – even if I’m making my own version of them with stripes and squiggles.” That and the fact that, practically, “cobalt is just really easy to work with – it stays on the pot beautifully.” When asked why, the answer comes from his wide eyes more than anything he says. George’s real preoccupation, though, is blue.

“I’m trying not to make it a granny’s garden, but I do seem to have planted everything in purple and pink…” George even uses her old wheel – “it’s a really lovely thing, full of important memories for me.” He seems happy here, with Suki’s veg garden at the back and his own little plot to tend to at the front – and it’s this, in all its blowsy beauty, that George overlooks while throwing the striped salt pigs, swirled pots and tendril-tangled bowls that have won him the attention of the likes of Birdie Fortescue, Tat’s Charlie Porter and Glassette. There’s a good creative legacy here, George explains, as his landlord’s late wife, Suki, was also a potter. He’s recently done the place up, painting the outside in traditional yellow limewash – “though it currently looks more Sweden than Somerset,” he says wryly. We’re in George’s studio, an ancient timber-framed building that he rents from friends for whom he used to work as a volunteer on their organic farm. In part it’s because life’s pretty good here on the edge of the Quantocks.

Not that that says much, for George – who until 2020 worked in hospitality for super swish clients on the slopes of the Swiss Alps – laughs a lot. One gets the sense that if you’d told a 25-year-old George Bronwin that, in his 30s, he’d be living in the depths of Somerset, earning his living as a potter and gardening furiously, he’d have laughed.

Wheel of fortune house chinese restaurant