Forty acres, eleven studios, and four hundred people making things.

A furniture works until 1974, an arts academy ever since. Day and boarding, ages 11 to 18.

A school built around its studios, not around its timetable.

The building was a furniture works until 1974, and it still behaves like one. Eleven studios open off a single double-height hall, so a ceramicist crosses a film set on the way to the kiln and hears an argument about it. Nothing here is behind a door that needs a reason.

Four hundred students, seventy staff, and a rule that the studios stay open from seven in the morning until ten at night, every day of the week. The rule is older than everyone currently working here and nobody has yet made a good case for changing it.

The main hall, rebuilt 2008

How we teach

A happy, noisy, forward-leaning school where the studios stay open until ten and someone is always mid-project.

How a week works.

Four fixed points, and the rest of the week arranged around them. Everything else on this page follows from these.

Mon – Tue

Long form

Two uninterrupted studio days. No lessons are scheduled across them and no one may book a meeting in them.

Wed

Critique

You stand next to your work and account for it in front of your studio. Ninety minutes, everyone, every week.

Thu

Open studios

Doors off the latch. Any student or member of staff can walk in unannounced and say what they think.

Fri

Visitors

A working artist or designer takes the afternoon. Forty of them across the year, none of them lecturing.

What we are known for.

Twenty-four disciplines are taught here. These four are the ones people come to us for, and the ones our leavers are hired on.

Two kilns, one wood-fired

Ceramics

Screen, litho, forge

Print and metal

Two stages, one grade suite

Moving image

Live room and modular lab

Sound

FOUNDED

1974

Manu et mente. By hand and by mind.

Margaret Ellory bought the furniture works in 1973 with money from a single commission and opened it to thirty students the following September. She had taught for eleven years and had one conviction about it: that thinking and making are the same act, and that separating them into a classroom and a workshop produces people who can do neither well.

Fifty-two years later the school is ten times the size and the conviction has not moved. Students work from their own questions rather than a set brief, show unfinished things to people who will be honest about them, and keep going after the easy version has been ruled out. Every timetable decision here is made by asking whether it protects that.

Margaret Ellory · Founder, 1974 to 1996

Three doors off this page.

The rooms, the day that runs through them, and the one practical page that turns an interest into a visit.

The studios →

How to apply →

Life here →

The studios are open. Come and see them.

The building is at its best on a working morning. Come on the second Tuesday of any month in the autumn term and walk the studios while they are in use.

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