London Craft Week returns with a city-wide programme honouring making traditions and innovations. Spanning more than 150 venues and bringing together more than 1,000 makers, the festival offers a rare opportunity to experience craftsmanship not as nostalgia, but as a living, evolving discipline — one that intersects with design, architecture, fashion and material innovation. This year’s programme leans into tactility and place, highlighting how making continues to shape the spaces we inhabit.
JW Anderson, Pimlico Road
Throughout London Craft Week, the new JW Anderson store on Pimlico Road opens as a curated exploration of craftsmanship, collecting and contemporary design thinking. The space moves beyond retail into something closer to a modern cabinet of curiosities, where fashion, homeware and artisanal objects coexist with equal weight. At its core is a commitment to elevated craft.
Behind the Shutter – An Exhibition: East meets West, Trellick Tower
Photography: courtesy of Jason Posnot (Or This Studio)
Photography: courtesy of Jason Posnot (Or This Studio)
Photography: courtesy of Jason Posnot (Or This Studio)
Photography: courtesy of Jason Posnot (Or This Studio)
On the ground floor of Erno Goldfinger’s 50-something Trellick Tower, this open studio offers a glimpse into the daily rhythms of contemporary woodworking. The so-called Makers of Trellick Tower (Emi Shinmura, Daniele Barco and Jason Posnot) invite visitors to watch their distinctive approach to timber framing, furniture-production and design — and their mutual commitment to woodworking traditions from the UK and Japan. The studio becomes an informal exhibition space, with hand tools, works-in-progress and finished pieces all on display. The emphasis is on process: visitors are encouraged to ask questions and engage directly with the makers, who will be on hand to discuss techniques, materials and the influences shaping their work.
The Old Ways: Craft & Cinema, The Barbican
At the Barbican Centre, the Old Ways unfolds as a quietly powerful counterpoint to the speed and intangibility of digital production. This season-long film programme brings together an international selection of documentaries that foreground the value of handmade practices as vessels of cultural memory, identity and place. Spanning disciplines from quilting and candle-making to indigo dyeing, the programme offers an expansive view of global craft traditions. Highlights include the UK premieres of Historjá – Stitches for Sapmí, following Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba and her politically charged embroidered narratives; the Colour of Ink, centred on Toronto inkmaker Jason Logan; and Shades of Indigo, a portrait of the dwindling number of artisans in Japan sustaining natural indigo production.
Studio Brocky x New Forms, Chelsea Listening Bar
Tucked off the King’s Road, New Forms provides an atmospheric backdrop for Studio Brocky’s presentation of hand-blown glass and cast metal. Founded by Max Brockbank, the practice sits at the intersection of contemporary design and traditional making, producing sculptural furniture. New Forms is a café and creative hub; by night, it shifts into a listening bar, offering an immersive way to experience craft beyond the confines of a traditional gallery.
Ranti Bam: Sacred Groves, South London Gallery
Courtesy of London Craft Week
A major solo presentation by British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam occupies South London Gallery Fire Station, exploring clay through sculpture, performance and film. Working between Paris and Lagos, Bam approaches ceramics as both a physical process and emotional register, where the body is not only maker but imprint. Her work here unfolds through two bodies of sculpture: the Ifas, large-scale stoneware forms created through embracing clay against the artist’s body, and Abstract Vessels, smaller, terracotta vessels. The exhibition explores the connection between material, the body and spirituality through the West African diaspora.
Lovers’ Court, 8 Holland Street
Art platform Wondering People presents Lovers’ Court, a six-week residency and exhibition bringing together three artist couples across two 19th-century townhouses on Kennington Lane. The exhibition draws loosely on themes of history, chivalry and connection, using the idea of the ‘court’ as romantic metaphor and spatial framework. Exhibiting artists include Joseph Dupré and Pollyanna Johnson, Hollie Bowden and Bryon Pritchard, Ana Naskidashvili and Frederik Poisquet (Morevi Studio), and Andrew Pierce Scott and Natalia Triantafylli. In their work, materials shift between wool, felt, porcelain and steel.
