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Afternoon outing to LDF.

We dragged ourselves away from our Macs last week and took a well deserved studio afternoon out, to sample the delights of London Design Festival. Luckily so much of the festival’s offerings were taking place right on our door step, so we didn’t have to venture far to find inspiration.

After a spot of lunch on the roof top of Shoreditch House, our first LDF stop was the Kemistry Gallery for Mind Over Matter: Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways – a celebration of ten years of his famous book which helped cement him as the daddy of ideas. Presumably anyone reading this blog would be interested in design and therefore know he was a member of the design consultancy Fletcher Forbes Gill, and a founding partner of Pentagram, but just incase you didn’t – you do now! The exhibition displays a collection of original material and notes from Alan Fletcher’s archive, and they succeeded in sparking a few neurons.
http://kemistrygallery.co.uk

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2nd stop: The Deeezen Space on Rivington Street, had some fab watch sculptures by Dominic Wilcox including a mini man on a real size watch sweeping up all the numbers. Multi award-winning Plumen lightbulbs were also on display en mass.
http://www.dezeen.com/dezeenspace/

3rd stop: Artwords book shop – a mightly fine bookshop for anyone interested in art, design and music.
http://www.artwords.co.uk

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After passing the Rivington Street art gallery designed by architect David Adjaye, we were lured by a cheeky chappy into our 4th stop: passing through a dramatic black curtain we discovered a display of furniture and lighting by product and interior designer Lee Broom. Loved his tiled lamp bases. His chairs and sofas were very dramatic, if a little bling.
http://www.leebroom.com

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Then onto Redchurch Street for out 5th stop: a shop selling a display of Cub-it shelving. Innovative designs. Great in repeat.

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6th stop:

a tiny pop-up shop (an overused word in my book – almost as annoying as ‘up-cycling’ and nearly as galling as the term ‘brand synergising’ I found myself coming up with last week). The contents of this pop-up shop seemed to consist of the entire contents of my understairs cupboard – Some victorian postcards, unusual matchboxes from around the world, ancient tennis rackets and dodgy sunglasses. (*note to self: forget the e-bay dream and set up pop-up shop in Form reception for LDF next year).

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7th stop: Speedies – which sells some great retro hi fi equipment, and also has a fine collection of Top of the Pops records and 70s board games. Not really part of LDF but a nice place to nose around. The record player featured in our Lettuce Scarves AW11 catalogue came from here.

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Nipping into a few watering holes for libations in Brick Lane, our last LDF stop was The Truman Brewery for Tent, a slightly edgier version of 100% design. Hundreds of designs unfolded in many rooms but Lee Borthwick’s Wave and Mirror Tapestry caught my attention, as did Tamasine Osher’s bike shelf.

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London felt alive with creativity  – and we didn’t even leave a mile radius of our own studio.