Alan Caiger-Smith was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1930. He studied painting and drawing at Camberwell School of Art in London, and between 1949 and 1952 read History at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1954-55 he attended evening classes in ceramics with Dora Billington at Central School of Art, where he learned tin-glazing, and in 1955 opened his pottery at Aldermaston in Berkshire. This became the main centre of decorated pottery production, with 6 to 8 potters working there at any one time. From 1956 to 1963 Caiger-Smith also ran a studio in Homer Street London, which ran concurrently with that in Aldermaston.

From 1973-78 he was Chairman of the British Crafts Centre, and in 1976 featured in Pottery Decoration, one of six films in the BBC Craft of the Potter series. In 1988 was appointed M.B.E.

The Aldermaston Pottery closed in 1993, and since then Caiger-Smith has written Pottery, People and Time; a history of the Aldermaston Pottery, and has worked on commissions. Only in the last few years of his life did he again produce studio pottery. Other books he has written are Tin-Glaze Pottery in Europe and the Islamic World (1973) and Lustre Pottery (1985).