The Fluxx Guide To: London Craft Week 2026, The Exhibitions, Makers & Moments Not to Miss
London Craft Week returns for its 12th edition this May, and the question is no longer whether craft matters , it is how much longer the rest of culture can afford to ignore it.
What to know London Craft Week 2026 runs 11 to 17 May across more than 150 venues in 14 London boroughs. Many events are free. Makers from 35 countries across 71 disciplines are taking part. Book tickets and explore the full programme at londoncraftweek.com.
Jochen Holz, Atelier Seventy Six.
There is a particular charge to this year's festival. Guy Salter, its founder, puts it plainly: the queues snaking down streets outside venues last year confirmed what many of us already sensed. Craft is not a niche pursuit or a nostalgic indulgence — it is, in the age of AI-generated everything, one of the most culturally urgent conversations happening right now. Jonathan Anderson, who guest-edits a selection of festival events and presents the first London Craft Week activation at JW Anderson's new Pimlico Road store, frames it with characteristic precision: there is something about the idea of human beings making things that will always command curiosity, wherever in the world you are from. We are inclined to agree.
THE 12TH EDITION OF London Craft Week
The 12th edition is the most expansive yet, bringing makers from 35 countries and over 70 disciplines to more than 150 venues across 14 boroughs. But scale alone does not tell the story. What distinguishes LCW 2026 is its willingness to ask harder questions, about which craft practices are disappearing, who gets to make a living from making, and what it means to build things by hand in a city that is increasingly building them by algorithm.
The debut Building Crafts Series throws this into sharp relief. Visitors can watch Portland stone being carved by hand at St Paul's Cathedral, access the hidden Triforium to see Sir Christopher Wren's Great Model, a feat of 17th-century carpentry that still stops you in your tracks, or join a behind-the-scenes event at the Palace of Westminster to discover the skills involved in preserving our most iconic heritage buildings.
THE FLUXX CRAFT WEEK HIGHLIGHTS Include
The Pimlico Road Series, Belgravia
Cox London, Hinterlands Lighter. Part of the Pimlico Road Series, 2026.
Left JW ANDERSON. Right,Ocher Bronze Pirouette tables.
One of London Craft Week's most enduring fixtures, the Pimlico Road Series returns for 2026, supported by Grosvenor, with 20 world-class design brands opening their doors across one of London's most storied interiors destinations. The street itself is the draw — a Belgravia neighbourhood lined with names like Rose Uniacke, Robert Kime, Soane Britain, Jamb and Nina Campbell, where the designers are often found in their own showrooms and every window tells a different story of craft, material and taste.
This year's programme spans talks, workshops and in-residence demonstrations across the district. Highlights include Swedish weaving legends Märta Måås-Fjetterström at Nina Campbell; Vandra Rugs celebrating the art of tapestry weaving; the Son Mài lacquer technique on show at The Lacquer Company; Cox London opening its atelier for behind-the-scenes tours; stone carving with It's Written In Stone; bookbinding workshops; and Young Weaver of the Year Leonie Edmead in residence at Rose Uniacke. Luke Irwin hosts a conversation with Speronella Marsh on pattern and nature, while Edward Bulmer Natural Paint explores the psychology of colour. JW ANDERSON — new to the street this year, presents a dedicated craft event on 13 May.
At the heart of it all is Newson's Yard, home to Nina Campbell, Flora Soames, And Objects, Plain English and The Lacquer Company, with restaurant Wildflowers providing a natural pause between showrooms.
Mayfair Spotlight
Mayfair Design District, London Craft Week 2026.
Mayfair Design District has partnered once again with London Craft Week. Across the district, galleries and showrooms present a vibrant programme including Mint’s exhibition CTRL Matter, exploring the evolving relationship between technology, organic processes and material experimentation, and a curated installation at the Savoir Mayfair showroom, The Language of Colour in Contemporary Design, examining how colour, materiality and craftsmanship shape our experience of rest and wellbeing.
The Design Museum
Left, Simone Brewster Portrait Photo credit Gavin Li. Right, Inner Voice by Simone Brewster at ‘The Shape of Things’ exhibition at NOW Gallery,2023. Photography Charles Emerson.
Two shows worth timing your London Craft Week visit around. NIGO: From Japan with Love is the first major global retrospective of the designer outside Japan — over 700 objects spanning his 30-year career, from the founding of A Bathing Ape in 1990s Harajuku to his current role as artistic director at Kenzo, including a life-size glass tea house and 600 pieces from his private archive.
Alongside it, PLATFORM: Simone Brewster presents the London-based designer's first ever museum show, a monographic display spanning jewellery, furniture and public architecture, layered with references from palaeolithic fertility deities to African diasporic traditions. Both are on now and free to visit
Sotheby’s
Vessel Gallery image Sothebys London Craft Week.
At Sotheby's Bond Street, Crafted brings together Secret Ceramics (100 anonymously priced works by established and emerging artists), a new auction of ceramic lots by names including Lucie Rie, Felicity Aylieff and Fernando Casasempere, and gallery presentations from O'Connell Gallery and Ruup and Form alongside a full programme of talks and workshops. The Pimlico Road Series returns with 20 exceptional design and interiors brands. The City of London opens its livery companies, guild halls and hidden workshops. Makers from South Korea, Italy, France, Thailand, Egypt and Indonesia bring a genuinely global breadth to the programme.
Future Icons Selects
Left, Rachel Karaskik Cradled, photo by Jorge Stride . Right, Ennui, Glass Frit, 2024.
Now in its fourth edition and its longest run to date, Future Icons Selects returns to 83 Rivington Street — three expansive industrial arches transformed into an immersive showcase of over 40 emerging and established makers working across ceramics, textiles, metalwork, fine art and collectible design. With the majority of exhibitors UK-based, it's one of the sharpest snapshots of contemporary British craft — and the place where collectors and interior designers consistently discover makers before galleries do.
Atelier Seventy-Six, Bayswater: Seven Makers, Seven Stories
If you visit one venue this London Craft Week, make it Atelier Seventy-Six. At 76 Sussex Square in west London, ceramic artist and founder Emma Louise Payne,has transformed a Georgian townhouse into a seven-day living study of contemporary craft — each room dedicated to a different discipline, each day bringing a different maker into sharper focus.
Payne's own practice sits at the heart of the programme. Following its debut at Collect, her new body of work exploring ritual, devotion and contemplation in the domestic sphere expands here to include sculptural prayer chairs, mirrors and wall sconces made entirely from clay. Drawing on historic devotional forms and the quieter textures of everyday habit, it asks how moments of stillness might be built into lives that rarely stop.
The wider roster reads like a considered edit of some of British craft's most compelling voices. Norfolk studio Otzi brings heirloom furniture in sustainably sourced British hardwoods and leather, where every joint, stitch and lacing line is deliberately visible — material honesty worn as a design statement. Richard Goldsworthy, working from the Hugo Burge Foundation in the Scottish Borders, fuses green wood with cast pewter in objects that celebrate imperfection as a creative position.
Weaver Aimee Betts brings textile-led furniture rooted in the history of knotting and braiding. Monica Findlay draws on Scottish archaeology and personal narrative to create silverwork that feels simultaneously ancient and newly minted. Textile artist Davey Powell reclaims Showman visual culture through bold quilted forms reframed through a queer lens, work that functions as both personal narrative and public declaration. RCA-trained lampworker Jochen Holz completes a lineup that feels genuinely curated rather than assembled.
Photography left and right, Monica Findlay.
Live demonstrations and intimate classes run throughout in the basement studio, offering the kind of up-close access to process and material knowledge that galleries rarely provide.
Atelier Seventy-Six is open daily 11 to 17 May, 1 to 6pm, with a launch party on Wednesday 13 May from 6 to 9pm at 76 Sussex Square, London W2.
County Hall Pottery: Refigured, Southbank
Photography, Eric Morecambe, Morecambe.
Photography left, John Rainey, David Copeland. Right, Claire Curneen.
Across the river, County Hall Pottery opens Refigured on 11 May and the exhibition carries particular weight, marking the final show in the organisation's permanent gallery space before it transitions to a nomadic programme model from June.
Refigured brings together five artists — Fernanda Cortes,Claire Curneen, Jessica Harrison, John Rainey and Renee So, to reconsider how the human body has been shaped, symbolised and imagined in clay across millennia. The ceramic figure has served as talisman, political statement, devotional object and ornament throughout human history. Here, those traditions are neither preserved intact nor discarded but interrogated with precision and feeling. Archetypes fracture. Idealisation gives way to vulnerability. The body becomes a site of tension and possibility rather than emblem or decoration.
That this is County Hall Pottery's farewell to its permanent gallery adds a quiet resonance to every work on show. The Potter in Residence programme continues, and an end-of-residency exhibition is planned for mid-August. But the art-school energy of this Southbank landmark, studios, kilns, gallery, shop and café operating as a single working environment — will be a different kind of presence in London's cultural life going forward. Go while it is still all of those things at once.
Taken together, these strands of London Craft Week 2026 make the case for contemporary craft as one of the most alive and culturally attuned fields working today. Not despite the handmade quality of it all. Precisely because of it.
London Craft Week runs 11 to 17 May 2026. Full programme at londoncraftweek.com
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