Learn a craft properly
A small school in the north teaching lettering, pattern, clay and print. Twelve places a course, taught by people who do the work.
Courses
Terms start in January, April and September. One free short course runs year round.
Editorial Layout
A free short course on grids, typographic hierarchy and pacing a long document. Six lessons, about ninety minutes.
Free
Ceramics: Hand-building Foundations
Pinch, coil and slab, taken seriously. No wheel — there is more in hand-building than a term can cover.
£320
Surface Pattern Design
Building repeats that hold together at any scale, and preparing them so a manufacturer can actually print them.
£280
Hand Lettering: Foundations
Eight weeks on the broad-edge pen. Letterforms first, style much later — the order most courses get backwards.
£240
How the courses run
Twelve places
Not a marketing number — it is what the kiln and the studio benches take.
Working practitioners
Everyone who teaches here still sells their own work. Nobody is teaching from a syllabus they did not write.
Materials included
Clay, glaze, firing, paper and ink. You bring your hands and a willingness to make a lot of bad work first.
Work you keep
You leave with finished pieces, not exercises — and with the judgement to make more without us.
From our students
Three terms of feedback, lightly edited.
“Three weeks on one letterform sounded absurd and turned out to be the entire point. I can letter now. I could not before.”
“I came in able to draw and left able to produce a repeat a printer would accept. Those are very different skills and only one of them was taught anywhere else I looked.”
“Twelve people and a tutor who knows your hands. Worth every penny of the fee and the train fare.”
From the studio
Choosing clay when everything in the catalogue sounds the same
A short, opinionated guide for people standing in a supplier's warehouse.
Studio notes: what twelve students taught us about class size
We tried sixteen. Here is what measurably changed, and why we went back.
Why we still teach by hand
Not nostalgia. The argument is about feedback, and it is a practical one.