Turning Earth Ceramics
"Like a gym membership for potters", discover four pioneering London studios cultivating craft both as an accessible hobby and as a viable career.
Go here if: You want to learn a new skill, make work in ceramics, be part of a community, find new ways to relax and unwind, nurture your creativity, or even develop your career.
What is it: Turning Earth's pioneering ceramics studios are for everyone, from beginners to part-time professionals, and can now be found in four London locations: Hoxton, Leyton, Tottenham and Highgate. They offer classes and open-access membership, "like a gym membership for potters".
Turning Earth Hoxton
Turning Earth Highgate
Why you need it: Turning Earth's mission is to cultivate craft both as an accessible hobby and as a viable career (they offer a full-time professional studio, In Production, in Leyton). They want to contribute towards a broad adult curriculum that will improve the quality of life in the city.
What they offer: All the ways to try making and develop skills: Tasters, 8 or 12-week beginners courses, intermediate courses, week-long courses, weekend-long courses, private workshops, and monthly membership.
For members, they also organise improvement workshops, like their very popular raku parties, and they have exclusive access to their quarterly ceramics markets.
Turning Earth Leyton
Turning Earth Tottenham
What makes it different: The community and atmosphere are unique to each of their studios. Someone might join for the craft and end up staying for the friends and a 'second home' discovered.
What else do you need to know: They are open every day till late except on Mondays. If you’re not local you can see the wide diversity of skills and techniques on their Instagram which is often updated with pots made by their members in the studio.
In their own words: Turning Earth was founded by Tallie Maughan. Their first studio, Turning Earth Hoxton, opened in December 2013. Following a model popular in the US, it was the first dedicated open-access ceramics studio in London.
“Turning Earth is indebted to the Arts and Crafts movement at the beginning of the 20th century, which suggested that there should be no separation between utility and art.
Our vision rests in the intuited feeling that we will naturally make life more beautiful when we take our aesthetic awareness, our right-brained feeling for things, as seriously as we take our rational understanding of the world.
We exist to enable people to make beautiful physical objects, and in so doing to make their lives more beautiful: more centred, more fulfilled, more present to what they truly care about.
We feel that in making this movement, we are encouraging a broader social shift towards living with care in our world.”
Hoxton Street Monster Supplies
Now allowing in humans, this store has everything the monster in you needs (and a not-so-secret cause behind it all).
For: monsters of every kind struggling to find the supplies they need to get through their ghoulish days and humans of all ages looking to restore make-believe in their lives.
What is it: One to enter at your own risk, this quirky store on an ordinary-looking street in Hackney is maybe the only one in the world (that we know of) that stocks “Bespoke and Everyday Items for the Living, Dead and Undead’.
What you need to know: Escape into your imagination with a store that is really one of its kind: since its murky start by newly exiled Igor the 1st in 1818 and its tentative steps into the human world in 2010, it has been serving everyone and everything with the kind of canned and boxed delights that any self-respecting creature needs, the fang floss, breath remedies, and dragon treats on our shopping list.
How to bring this into your undead life: Wherever you are, your way into this world is definitely via witty and fantastic products like their Salt Made from the Tears Shed while Home Schooling, Mummy’s Sewing Kit and packets of powdery pink brain food. If you live locally, volunteer to help brave visitors survive the store or become a writing mentor in the Ministry of Stories.
Why we think it’s different: Beyond its license to sell ‘items including, but not limited to: Malodulous Gases, Children’s Ears, Gore, Fear (tinned only)”, behind a secret password guarded door is The Ministry of Stories , a creative and mentoring charity for mini-humans aged 8 to 18.
The not-for-profit was started by About a Boy / Fever Pitch / High Fidelity writer Nick Hornby with Lucy Macnab and Ben Payne and was modeled on Dave Egger’s 826 Valencia. The aim of the classes here is to make writing fun and accessible across all genres from gaming to screenwriting, cookbook contributions, and graphic novels, and to build the confidence that comes with creative adventures on the page experienced in a supportive community.
It’s now been widely published that there’s a curse in the store – that makes all profits go to the Ministry of Stories. As Minister of Fluency, the beloved by us and many a monster, Colin Firth declares “you know your helping to support the business of the imagination with the next generation”, so maybe this is one hex that we humans won’t venture to break.
In their own words: “We pride ourselves on being London’s, and quite possibly the world’s, only purveyor of quality goods for monsters of every kind. Many of our customers have been coming to us for centuries. Indeed, some have been coming for considerably longer. Whether you’re a Vampire, Werewolf, Sasquatch or something else entirely, we have everything you need.”
Something to inspire: Short of attempting to rebrand everything in our homes – will our kids go with water if it’s the elixir of life – look to ways to bring in the make-believe. In a year, when we’re been abruptly pulled up by reality, there are ways of escape that might be nearer than the dream destinations we’re been longing for – retreats made in our minds, and played out in worlds of our own making. Even travel bans can't go there. But monsters can.