Urban Makers Christmas Market — Saturday 28 November
By Urban MakersFifty independent designers, food, drink and workshops at the Ecology Pavilion in Mile End Park. Free entry, 11am–5pm.
About this event
Where
Ecology Pavilion
Mile End Park, Grove Road, London E3 4PX
Good to know
Free entry
No ticket needed — just turn up. Bring a bag for life.
Step-free access
The whole market is step-free with accessible toilets on site.
Getting here
Please travel by public transport or bike — there is no visitor parking.
Meet the makers
Concrete Botanicals
Print & illustration
I make botanical studies of weeds. Buddleia out of a railway wall, ragwort on a verge, the fig tree that has taken over a car park near me. They are drawn in coloured pencil from life, which means a lot of standing about in high-vis looking suspicious, then reproduced as giclée prints on textured cotton paper. Each print names the plant in Latin and gives the street where I found it. I sell them loose or mounted in reclaimed frames.
Crackle & Glaze
Ceramics
I chase crazing on purpose. My glazes are formulated to craze finely, and after the second firing I rub in a tea and oxide wash so the whole surface shows a delicate web. I throw bottle vases, wide fruit bowls, and a tall carafe with two beakers that ends up on people's bedside tables. A white stoneware body keeps the crackle legible. Interiors get a stable liner glaze, so everything stays watertight and properly usable rather than decorative.
Cutting Room Nine
Textiles & accessories
I spent twelve years as a pattern cutter for other people's labels and now I cut for myself.
Ember & Ash Studio
Ceramics
My work is really all about the glaze. I collect ash from apple prunings and from oak offcuts a joiner two doors down saves for me, wash it, sieve it, and build glazes that break green and grey over a rim. I throw tall vases, lidded jars and the sort of mug people end up claiming as theirs. A firing takes fourteen hours and I sit with it. Nothing is glazed twice the same way, so a market table from me is genuinely a one-off collection.
Foolscap & Fold
Stationery
I bind notebooks by hand using a Japanese stab binding and a long-stitch over exposed cord, so the sewing is part of the look rather than hidden in a spine.
Gasholder Pottery
Ceramics
My studio window faces the old gasholder frames, and that ironwork ends up in my surfaces as grids, rivets and verticals stamped into the clay before it dries. I make mugs, planters and squat vases in a mid-brown stoneware with a dry ash-grey glaze that skips over the texture and settles in the lines. I throw two days a week around a part-time job, so the range stays small. Everything is once-fired at high temperature, which keeps it genuinely tough.
Graphite Yard
Stationery
I make desk things in a small workshop: pencil cases from waxed canvas, turned wooden pen rests, and a leather roll that holds twelve pencils. It grew out of being unable to find anything decent for a drawing kit that was not either plastic or absurdly expensive. Everything is cut and sewn by me, and the wooden pieces are turned from offcuts of oak. I sell alongside good pencils I do not make, and I always say clearly which items on the table are mine.
Halfmoon Metalsmith
Jewellery
I raise small vessels and jewellery from flat discs using a hammer and a sandbag, the same way silversmiths have for centuries. It is loud, slow and physical. The results are curved ear studs, spoon-shaped pendants and tiny silver bowls that people buy for rings by the sink. Every piece is planished at the end, hundreds of overlapping hammer marks that make the surface shimmer. I trained through evening classes over six years and still learn something from every disc I ruin.
Indigo Allotment
Textiles & accessories
I grow my own dye plants on a plot in Hackney: dyer's chamomile, weld, madder root and a stubborn row of Japanese indigo.
Kerbside Blooms
Plants & florals
I propagate houseplants from cuttings, mostly from my own overgrown collection and from swaps with other growers, then pot them into terracotta and grow them on until they are properly rooted and stable. Nothing I sell is a fresh cutting stuck in soil the week before. The range is trailing plants, spider plant babies, string of hearts, and a rotating shelf of oddities. Every pot has a card with light and watering notes written in plain English rather than the usual vague nonsense.
Kiln Formed
Glass
I fuse and slump glass in a kiln rather than blowing it, so my work is flat: dishes, coasters, small wall panels and jewellery. I stack sheet glass with layers of powder and stringer between them, fire it to 800 degrees to fuse, then fire again over a mould to give it a shape. Each firing cycle takes eighteen hours including the cooling, so nothing is quick. Colours are deliberately restrained, mostly steel blue, olive and a warm smoky grey that suits British light.
Koji & Co
Food & drink
I grow koji on barley in an incubator I built from a broken wine fridge, then use it to make miso, shio koji and a fermented chilli paste. The misos sit in buckets under weights for anything from six months to two years, so what I sell now was started long before I knew whether it would work. My six-month barley miso is sweet and light, the two-year is dark and properly savoury. I give people spoons and explain how to use it, since most have only met it in soup.
Lost Wax Lane
Jewellery
I carve wax models under a magnifying lamp, which is how I lose whole afternoons.
Marlpit Pottery
Ceramics
Marlpit began when I dug clay out of my parents' field in Kent and hauled it back to London in buckets.
Moss & Mortar
Plants & florals
I cast planters from a concrete and recycled aggregate mix, then plant them up with drought-tolerant things that will forgive being ignored: sedums, echeveria, small houseleeks. The pots are cast in moulds I make from old food packaging, so the shapes are quietly familiar without being obvious. Each has a drilled drainage hole and a cork foot so it will not mark a windowsill. I sell them planted or empty. The plants are all propagated from my own stock over the previous year.
Moth & Moon Jewellery
Jewellery
My work is all lunar phases and moth wings, cut from silver sheet and given a satin brush finish.
Mudlark Made
Ceramics
Everything begins with a sketchbook of things pulled out of the river: clay pipe stems, bottle necks, worn scraps of transfer-printed china.
Nettle & Gold
Jewellery
I use keum-boo, an old Korean technique where fine gold foil is fused onto silver with heat and burnishing rather than glue or plating. It gives a warm gold that will never wear off. My shapes are simple discs, pebbles and long bars, hung on chain I make link by link. The gold goes on in irregular patches, like lichen on stone. Each earring in a pair is close but not identical, which I say clearly, because a few people want them matched.
Ore & Origin
Jewellery
Traceability is the reason I started. Every gram of metal I use is recycled and every stone comes from a cutter I can name, mostly British-mined fluorite, Scottish agate and rough diamonds from a certified single source. I make substantial rings and pendants with heavy bezels and a matt finish that suits the stones better than polish. Each piece leaves with a card saying where the material came from. It costs me more and I would rather explain why than hide it.
Paper Cartographer
Print & illustration
I draw maps by hand of things that are not usually mapped: every lido within the M25, the lost rivers of east London, the route of a walk somebody sends me. The lettering is all hand-drawn with a technical pen, which is the slow part and the reason I do it. They print as large sheets on uncoated paper that takes a pencil if you want to annotate. I take commissions for personal maps and those take about six weeks from first sketch.
Quiet Hammer
Jewellery
My whole range is forged from a single gauge of square wire, twisted, tapered and curled into bangles, ear cuffs and open rings that you squeeze to fit. Because it is all one material there is very little waste, and offcuts get soldered into chain links. I work in brass for the affordable end and silver above that. The finish is deliberately dark, brought back with beeswax rather than lacquer, so it keeps ageing after it leaves me.
Second Life Timber
Woodwork
I work exclusively with reclaimed timber, mostly floor joists and scaffold boards from demolition sites, which means a lot of time with a metal detector and a nail punch before I can even plane a board.
Slow Lather
Bath & body
I make castile soap, which is olive oil and nothing else, and cure it for a full year rather than the usual six weeks. A year-old bar is harder, milder and lasts about twice as long in a soap dish, so it works out cheaper despite costing more. That does mean everything I sell today was made last summer and I have to plan absurdly far ahead. I also make a shaving soap in a tin, whipped to hold a lather, and sell a badger-free brush alongside it.
Solder & Sea
Jewellery
I grew up on the Kent coast and I still collect there: worn sea glass, tiny limpets, the odd piece of pottery smoothed by fifty years of tide. Back at the bench I make fine silver bezels for each one, which is fiddly because none of them are the same shape twice. The result is pendants and rings that are genuinely one of a kind. I bring a tray of loose finds to markets so people can choose their own and I set it during the day.
Soot & Saffron
Candles & home fragrance
I hand-roll incense the way my aunt taught me, mixing powdered woods, resins and gums with water into a stiff paste, then rolling it onto bamboo sticks and drying them flat for a week.
Steam & Sage
Bath & body
I make things for the shower rather than the bath, because most London flats do not have one. Steam tablets you drop on the shower floor, a salt scrub in a jar, and a solid conditioner bar that took eleven attempts to get right. The eucalyptus and sage blend is the one people come back for, especially in January. Everything is made in small batches in a certified kitchen and packaged in card and aluminium, no plastic bottles anywhere in the range at all.
The Honey Round
Food & drink
I keep eleven hives on rooftops and allotments across east London and bottle the honey by postcode, so you can taste the difference between a hive over a lime avenue and one near a buddleia embankment. It is raw, coarse-filtered and never heated, which keeps the pollen in and means some jars set solid. Alongside the honey I sell beeswax food wraps and a small amount of comb when there is any. Harvest is late summer, so by March I am usually sold out and honest about it.
The Slow Wheel
Ceramics
I make one thing properly at a time. This year it is teapots: spout, handle, lid and gallery all thrown and assembled, which takes the best part of a day each. I work in a dark stoneware under a celadon glaze that runs pale over the throwing rings and pools green in the shoulders. Matching cups and a small tray come with them. I finish maybe eight a month, so markets are less about volume and more about meeting whoever will use them.
The Turning Shed
Woodwork
I turn on a lathe, which is the only power tool I own and the only one I want. Bowls, lidded pots, candlesticks and a set of nesting rings for babies to chew on. I rough-turn green wood, let it dry for six months in a bag of shavings, then finish it once it has stopped moving, so nothing I sell will crack later. Walnut and sycamore are my favourites. Sanding goes to 400 grit and then it is oiled, which takes longer than the turning did.
Third Window Candles
Candles & home fragrance
Every scent I make is tied to a specific room I have lived in. There is one that smells like my grandmother's kitchen, all cardamom and warm ghee, and one built around the damp plaster and jasmine of a flat I hated. I pour soy wax into small stoneware cups thrown by a friend, so the vessel keeps its use afterwards as an eggcup or a brush pot. Batches are twenty candles at a time, poured over a weekend, and each one is labelled with the room.
Thistle & Thread
Textiles & accessories
I weave on a four-shaft floor loom that takes up most of my living room. The yarn is British wool from a mill in the Borders, undyed or plant-dyed in my kitchen with onion skins, madder and woad. I make scarves, throws and small woven bags, all finished by hand-twisting the fringes, which is the part that takes the longest. Warping the loom for a run of six scarves takes a full day before any weaving starts. I have been doing this for eleven years.
Tote & Tassel
Textiles & accessories
I macramé, which had a bad decade in the seventies and deserves better. Everything is knotted by hand from unbleached cotton rope, no glue and no hardware except a length of dowel. I make plant hangers, wall hangings, market bags and long tasselled key fobs. The bigger hangings involve about four hundred knots and I count them, badly. I also run short workshops, so at markets I sell a beginner kit with rope, a dowel and an illustrated card for the two starter knots.
Verdigris & Vine
Jewellery
I cast tiny botanical things in silver and bronze: a hawthorn leaf from the canal path, an ash key, a curl of vine tendril.
Wildseed Jewellery
Jewellery
Enamel is my material. I sift powdered glass onto copper and silver and fire it in a small kiln, usually four or five layers, and the colour only really arrives at the end. My palette is meadow: poppy red, cornflower, a green that shifts depending on the light. The shapes are simple domed discs and petal drops, so the colour does the talking. Enamel chips if you drop it on tile, and I say so honestly rather than pretending it is indestructible.
Wool & Wander
Textiles & accessories
I hand-knit hats, mittens and long socks on double-pointed needles, in undyed wool from a flock of Shetlands I visit once a year in Cumbria.
Workshops
Kokedama moss balls
with Wildseed Jewellery · Adults and families, ages 10+ · 60 min
Wrap a fern or peace lily in a ball of clay soil and living moss, then bind it in jute twine to hang or sit in a dish. Mucky, calming, and the plant care talk at the end is the part everyone writes down.
Sat 28 Nov, 12:00 · Workshop corner, next to A8· 6 places left
Sat 28 Nov, 14:00 · Workshop corner, next to A8· 12 places left
Natural dyeing: avocado and onion skin
with Crackle & Glaze · Adults · 90 min
Dye a silk scarf in a bath made from kitchen waste — avocado stones for dusty pink, onion skins for warm gold. We cover mordanting, why the colour shifts, and how to wash it so it lasts.
Sat 28 Nov, 12:00 · Workshop corner, next to B1· 3 places left
Clay pinch pots
with Foolscap & Fold · Families, ages 5+ with an adult · 60 min
Make two small pots with nothing but your hands and a wooden tool, then decorate with stamps and slip. Pots are air-dry clay so they go home with you the same day — no kiln, no waiting three weeks.
Sat 28 Nov, 12:00 · Workshop corner, next to C10· 9 places left
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Moderate refunds. Full refund available until 7 days before the event.
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