Alison Britton was born in Harrow, Middlesex in 1948 and studied at Leeds College of Art 1966–7, Central School of Art and Design 1967–70, and Royal College of Art 1970–73. After working in the group studios 401½ Workshops in Wandsworth, she shared a railway arch with Jacqueline Poncelet in Kings Cross, and since 1986 has had her own studio in Stamford Hill.
As part of a group of students graduating from the RCA in the Seventies who were engaged in changing the rules for the crafts, and sustained at a formative stage by the exhibiting drive of the newly initiated Crafts Council (then the Crafts Advisory Committee) and the British Council, she has shown her pots very widely internationally and has work in numerous public collections including the V&A, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum (Rotterdam), the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney), the Llandes Museum (Stuttgart), and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.
A book by Peter Dormer and David Cripps, Alison Britton in Studio, was published by Bellew Books in 1985.
She had a retrospective exhibition in 1990 at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, which toured museums in the UK and culminated in the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam. Tanya Harrod wrote a monograph, which accompanied this show, also published by Bellew books. She was awarded the OBE in 1990.
In 1993 she curated, with Martina Margetts, a large British contemporary ceramics exhibition called The Raw and the Cooked for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, which was also shown at the Barbican, and in Taiwan, Japan, France, and Wales.
Since 1998 she has been represented by the Barrett Marsden Gallery, London, and has solo exhibitions there every two or three years. For her 2000 show, Barrett Marsden published a monograph written by Linda Sandino. She has written extensively on contemporary applied arts, mainly exhibition leaflets, catalogue essays, and reviews, but also some less ephemeral book introductions and chapters. She has also lectured internationally on her own work and the context of modern British ceramics.
She was a part-time lecturer at various BA colleges and joined the RCA as a tutor in the Ceramics and Glass Department in 1984, was made a Fellow in 1990 and has been a Senior Tutor since 1998. She has been an external examiner for BA ceramics courses at Camberwell, Goldsmiths, Dundee, Westminster, Falmouth, Edinburgh, and Loughborough, and at MA level at Dublin.