London

London Lights

Sometimes there are moments which remind me how much I love living in London. I was out for drinks with my friend when I realised it was the last night of Lumiere: the Festival of Light in London, so after our evening we ventured up Regent Street to see the sights.


An illuminated elephant standing within the pillars of a building at the Piccadilly Circus end of the street was shifting from foot to foot and – with full sound effects – emitting the occasion grunt. The wonderment continued further up the street, which had been pedestrianised for the event. Enormous coloured fish floated ethereally above the crowds in the freezing London night.

We just managed to make our way through to Piccadilly to see that the elephant also had a backside – a huge elephantine bottom illuminated between the pillars on the other side of the building – which we glimpsed just before the lights were switched off at the stroke of midnight.

New Year, Green Shoots

Over Christmas our new house was looking like a total building site, but now in the new year I can see a few things which feel like green shoots emerging out of the rubble!


Never would I have thought I’d feel that way about a plastered wall or an installed toilet, but it is wonderful to behold…. like seeing the promise of our new life!

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Christmas Shopping


Over the Christmas break the house lay in a state of suspended indignity. It had been stripped right down to the bones, and then left with all its innards showing! All the floors had been pulled up so the builders could to rewire and lay new plumbing in between joists. We had to tread very carefully as nothing was nailed down and all that was left standing was the stairs (minus the banisters).


While the builders were putting their feet up over Christmas, I was busy shopping. We visited so many bathroom showrooms, I started seeing shower attachments in my dreams, but the compulsion to get the best price we could while the January sales lasted was too strong to stop. I started making mockups of the main bathroom to make sure our decor choices worked before committing to the shopping list, and then the money was spent. Cash haemorrhaged out of our account as thousands of pounds were spent on tiles, taps and the piece de resistance, a very beautiful stone resin freestanding bath. Buying for two bathrooms, an ensuite and a downstairs wc became confusing when only trying to pay the lowest prices and somehow, despite my meticulous record keeping, the relentless website comparisons meant I slightly lost my mind and ended up ordering an extra toilet!

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Now You See It

As soon as we bought our new house, I felt the pressure was on not to waste a moment and get on with the business of finding a builder. I had seven different builders come over to give me a rough idea of costs for the extensive building works needed. Horrifyingly, the first builder quoted a cost so high we could have bought another house at that price! Interestingly, not one of the builders turned out to be English. I ended up going with my gut feeling and asked Jonathan – a Chinese builder who bizarrely had a hint of a Yorkshire accent – to start the first part of the job immediately.

I would have assumed that the demolition and stripping out of a house is possibly easier than rebuilding it, but when Jonathan brought only two men for the job – Ming and Lin – I had my doubts. Ming turned up with a trendy haircut and slim cut jeans and looked like he might have just graduated from a graphics or illustration course at Central Saint Martins. Lin, while slightly older and more robust, was nonetheless still disconcertingly small. How on earth would just the three of them manage to dismantle and rebuild a whole house?!


And yet within a few days, they had completely stripped back pretty much everything. I did not even have time to take photographs of the house before work started and half the house was in the skip outside! Layers of wallpaper, tiles, and plaster were stripped back to reveal the original lathe and plaster construction.


Entire bathrooms were reduced to piles of rubble and pipes…. above are pictures of before and after Ming and Lin had done their thing!


The bath in one bathroom was left plumbed in while the entire room was dismantled around it to reveal the fireplace and window of the bedroom beyond!


December turned into a series of surprises. Every couple of days I would turn up for a site visit to find new things. One time I walked into a room to find the bottom six inches of the wall missing (above, left); the next time I came in, all that was left was the original Victorian beams within the wall (above, right).


The back chimney was crumbling away so the builders removed the old chimney breast which connected three rooms at the back of the house. The brickwork left behind showed the shape of the chimney that had been hidden behind the wall all these years, but when I got too close I had the vertigo-inducing realisation that there was now a gap in the floor through which I was looking down three storeys to the ground (above, right).

Eight skips were filled with detritus from the house and the space was cleared for the next stage after Christmas.

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Christmas Dish and Spoon

Dish and Spoon

My whole life was packed into storage in November and it has remained there ever since, so the best I could hope for this December in terms of Christmas shows was going to be very low key. The Dish and Spoon, a cafe in Nunhead, offered a lovely opportunity to come together with some other local mums to put on a pop-up.


I spent a lovely morning hanging a colourful window display with Sarah Capel of Sarah Capel Printing and Peggy Mends of Peggy Bamford and an even more enjoyable Saturday selling to locals in the lovely warm atmosphere of the Dish and Spoon.

The Next Challenge

It’s finally ours! My next challenge is to project manage the full renovation and refurbishment of this, our new house, and (eventually) to custom design and build a glass studio in place of the existing garage. We were specifically looking for a corner property to allow the studio to have its own entrance, and there weren’t that many in the areas we were looking, but we finally found this oddity in West Norwood.

Side of house

I could kind of see why the builder from across the road said it was like a castle – it is a strange building with different roofs, windows in seemingly random places and parts that look like they’ve been added on as an afterthought. The last owners made it even uglier by adding a very badly constructed wraparound extension with cheap bricks and then bricking over the garden and adding high walls which led neighbours to describe it as ‘a prison yard’! As a final flourish, they built the new brick patio about eight inches too high which left the whole ground floor with a damp problem. 

Inside is even stranger with a front-heavy layout, where the rooms at the front are enormous and the rooms at the back are small. This unbalanced layout has been made even worse by the people we bought it from who carved up the small rooms into even smaller rooms by adding small bathrooms everywhere so that they could have guests with their own ensuites.

All in all, quite a project and one which I have no idea when it will be finished.

Right…. to work!

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Studio Thoughts Part II

The Contemporary Glass Society had a great turnout for its Creative Hub session last Saturday, and I suspect that – like me – many people came along because of the opportunity to visit the studio of Angela Thwaites that was promised as part of the day. Angela is a well known glass artist who casts beautiful intimate objects from glass and teaches glass internationally. I also knew Angela from a few years ago when at one of our Teepee Glass exhibitions we invited Angela to exhibit as our guest artist, so I was keen to see where she makes her work, and clearly I was not the only one. The assembled crowd was so large that a local church hall had to be sequestered to accommodate us all for the Creative Hub discussions in the afternoon.

It wasn’t until the evening that the group snaked its way through the streets of south London to Angela’s house and so it was that we were ushered in smaller groups of four through her now dark and freezing garden to squeeze into her compact studio.


Glass casting requires a lot of equipment so I had expected a large space but I was taken aback at how small her garden studio was, and yet how everything fit so carefully into the tiny space. Various kilns, cold working equipment and a large sink all fit into this three dimensional puzzle of a space with all the surrounding gaps filled with shelves of materials and samples of moulds and glass.


Having just packed up and left my own studio – and knowing I will be without a studio for months now –  it seemed at once familiar and poignant to be reminded how we artists try to create beautiful and perfect objects from within a space that often feels like organised chaos. 

Bike

However seeing Angela’s bike propped up against the machinery, and realising that she must have to move that bike into the garden every time she works, I also remembered the reason I  am moving…. there came a point when my studio tipped from being organised chaos to simply being chaotic, and ultimately I am putting up with being studio-less for the next few months in order to build a better space for myself in the long term.

Studio Thoughts: Part I


Hello Herne Hill! I haven’t lived here since I left home twenty five years ago, save for a few months when we temporarily moved back to my parent’s home whilst buying my house. And now it is ten years later and I’ve just sold that house, so we are bookending the decade with another stint at my parents until the new house is ready to move into. Phew!

Goodness knows how long we will be here, as builders are often slower than they say they will be and there is the small issue of obtaining planning permission for various building works from Lambeth Council, which is not known for its competence or efficiency! So in the meantime I am making do with a small kiln and a cramped workspace in my parents’ garage.


I’ve gone from a lovely warm organised studio (left) to a freezing cold mess in my parents’ garage (right), but I keep telling myself it will all be worth it in the end.

Gala and Glaziers

Having back to back shows is never much fun, and with barely 24 hours between the end of Made London in Marylebone and the start of the Glaziers’ Fair in London Bridge there was barely time to catch my breath. However the second show was (thankfully) much smaller and required only a simple set up, albeit in the grand surroundings of the River Room at Glaziers’ Hall. It was lovely to watch the river rise and fall at London Bridge right outside the window and quite different to doing trade shows in anonymous event halls.

Unfortunately both shows were blighted by numerous phone calls from various estate agents and solicitors trying to agree the final terms of sale of my house and purchase of our new home…. it’s difficult to do a soft sell on passing customers while simultaneously getting into hardcore negotiations on the mobile!

So the gala evening, held on the first evening for the University of Oxford Alumni Network, was a welcome break from these complicated discussions to indulge in some canapes and sell some glass to the amassed alumni.

MADE London

Made London took up residence in the church at Great Portland Street four years ago and has gone from strength to strength since then. I have had Made London on my exhibiting radar for quite some time as I had heard good things about it as a central London selling show. Particularly since the demise of Origin – and its predecessor, the Chelsea Craft Show – there hasn’t really been a large regular show in London curating contemporary crafts for a dedicated database of customers, but Made London seemed to be confidently claiming that position.


When curating our own show Designed | Crafted last year, we picked up a couple of makers from last year’s Made London who we thought were a great fit and one of them turned out to be Sarah Young, who also happens to be one of the organisers of Made London. It wasn’t until I spent a day invigilating our own show with her partner Jon Tutton that I heard about Made London direct from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and I decided to apply this year.


I was happy to have made it past the selection panel, as there is now a long list of disappointed applicants who try to get in to exhibit each year at One Marylebone,  the wonderful venue that is used for the show. Originally built in 1826, the Holy Trinity Church was one of only three churches designed by Sir John Soane but it was considered the most architecturally distinguished. It was sympathetically renovated and reopened in 2008 as a leading London events venue, and Made London has been occupying it for a weekend in October for the last four years. It is a magnificent space, with four levels each having its own feel which adds to the atmosphere that this is a unique selling show in the Craft calendar.


I took a large stand on the first floor galleries which had beautiful tall arched windows all the way along. Having a lovely big stand meant I had space to exhibit my Global Treasury lightboxes which I rarely display because of the space required. Hiding the electrics is always a bit of a faff, but it was well worth it this time as I mounted twelve lightboxes on the back wall plus a new piece based on the Global Treasury range but made much larger at 60cm square.

Good sales of the lightboxes during and after the show made me reconsider my Global Treasury lightboxes. I realised, with some nostalgia, that these were in fact my very first collection of retail items – they were the first pieces I thought about in terms of a product range with distinct patterns designed to be replicated. I enjoy making batches of these lightboxes as there is enough scope within them to play with colour so as to make each one unique even though they follow an overall design. Also because the cost ratio of materials to labour is favourable it means I have been able to keep the retail price consistent over the years. Although I have streamlined both the number of designs in the range, as well as the making process, the one thing I have never managed is to hone the making process down to the bone to supply them at trade prices, despite having had numerous requests from my stockists over the years. Maybe this could be a challenge for next year?