London Craft Week 2025
Craft Here, Craft Now
West Dean College is CRAFTS: the classroom is the studio, the desk is the bench, and the pen is the tool
Guided by the utopian vision of founder Edward James, who gifted his stately home to be a college for the furtherance of the crafts and creativity, skills he saw as under threat in postwar Britain, West Dean is the place where the makers of the future are trained.
Through an unrivalled deep immersion in traditional and contemporary practice and making, guided by experienced tutors, West Dean craft and fine art students transform raw materials into beautiful things: books, musical instruments, timepieces, furniture, metalsmithing and ceramics.
The West Dean: Craft Here, Craft Now interactive exhibition at London's Craft Week presents a collection of objects crafted by emerging makers who share the hidden stories behind their making. Through images, showreels and live demonstrations, the hours of painstaking skill needed to make a piece of fine furniture, carve a viol body from solid timber or transform sheet metal into a beautiful timepiece, deploying often under threat crafts, is brought into stark reality.
