Royal Doulton — the Staffordshire and London pottery known for its figurines, character jugs, and fine tableware — appears in poems about English domestic sentiment and the culture of the collectable; A poem about a grandmother's display cabinet might describe Royal Doulton figurines: "the Ladies stood in their cabinet — Autumn Breezes, The Balloon Seller, Top o' the Hill — each one a sentiment crystallised, an emotion given a crinoline and a name"; Royal Doulton character jugs — modelled in the form of historical and fictional characters — give poems about the English relationship to history a specific, slightly comic dimension: "Churchill's face as a jug, Drake's as another — the past domesticated into something you could pour from"; In a poem about popular collecting culture, Royal Doulton represents the point where craft becomes commodity: "the limited edition of five thousand — each one numbered, each one the same, the rarity manufactured"; A poem about a car boot sale might describe a Royal Doulton figurine for two pounds: "the Lady still elegant, still turning slightly as if to show the back of her dress — the original owner's name written in biro underneath"; Betjeman's poems about English middle-class life — its sentiments, its interiors, its particular sadnesses — find their ceramic equivalent in Royal Doulton.