Urban Makers Christmas Market — Sunday 29 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
Bench & Bevel
Woodwork
I make small storage: dovetailed boxes, a desk tidy, a wall-hung key cabinet, a box for a pack of cards.
Common Ground Clay
Ceramics
I make pottery from reclaimed studio clay, everybody's scraps wedged back together, which produces a marbled grey body nobody can buy in a bag. The shapes stay simple: straight-sided beakers, low bowls, a bud vase, a soap dish with proper drainage. One satin white glaze lets the marbling read through. It is my small answer to how wasteful ceramics can be. I keep a bin on the stall for chipped pots so people can return them to be crushed into grog.
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.
Endgrain & Co
Woodwork
My speciality is end-grain butcher's blocks, where the wood is cut into cubes and glued standing up so the knife goes between the fibres rather than across them.
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.
Glasshouse Terrariums
Plants & florals
I build closed terrariums that genuinely work, which means proper drainage, activated charcoal, a sterile substrate and plants that actually like living in a humid jar.
Grain & Gable
Woodwork
I make chopping boards and serving boards from British hardwoods, mostly ash, cherry and a bit of walnut when I can get offcuts cheaply.
Hearth & Hush
Candles & home fragrance
I pour into vessels I cast myself from jesmonite, in a speckled terrazzo made with crushed offcuts from previous batches.
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.
Live Culture Kitchen
Food & drink
I brew water kefir and kombucha in five-litre jars on a shelf in my kitchen, second-fermented with fruit so they carbonate naturally in the bottle rather than being force-carbonated. Flavours rotate with what is cheap and good: blood orange in winter, strawberry and basil in June, a ginger and turmeric that never goes away. I bottle into swing tops, keep everything refrigerated, and label with the brew date. Because it is alive, it keeps changing, and I would rather explain that than pasteurise it flat.
Loom & Lantern
Textiles & accessories
I tuft rugs and wall hangings using a hand-operated tufting gun and a frame the size of a door. The yarn is New Zealand wool, cut and carved after tufting so the pile has raised and sunken areas, almost like relief carving. Designs come from the tilework I grew up around in Tripoli, redrawn in colours that suit a British flat. A small rug takes three days including the backing and binding. I take custom sizes and always sketch on paper with the customer first.
Low Tide Candles
Candles & home fragrance
I make coastal scents without any of the usual blue-bottle clichés. Wet rope, seaweed drying on shingle, diesel and chips on a harbour wall, done with restraint so they smell like a memory rather than a gift shop. The wax is coconut and rapeseed, poured into amber glass with a wooden wick that crackles quietly. I also make reed diffusers with the same blends for people who cannot have a flame at home. Everything is hand-poured in batches of thirty in a workshop in Deptford.
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.
Nightshift Etching
Print & illustration
I drive a night bus four evenings a week and draw everything I see from the cab in a pocket sketchbook at the terminus.
Offcut Studio
Woodwork
Everything I make comes from the skips of joinery workshops across east London, which means my material is free and completely unpredictable.
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.
Riven Timber
Woodwork
I split logs along the grain with wedges instead of sawing across it, which is how chair legs were made for centuries and is far stronger.
Salt Marsh Ceramics
Ceramics
I work in a shed at the bottom of a garden in Wembley, which is not a salt marsh, but the glazes come from a year I spent on the Essex coast.
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.
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 Drawing Shed
Print & illustration
My work is portraits of pets, done in ink and coloured pencil with a lot of attention to whiskers and the exact wrongness of an individual dog's ears. Customers send photographs and I draw from those, usually two weeks turnaround. At markets I bring the ready-made prints of common breeds plus a folder of past commissions, and I sketch small pet portraits live for a fixed price. It is the most joyful work I have ever done and people cry at the stall fairly often.
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.
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.
Tote & Tassel
Textiles & accessories
I macramé, which had a bad decade in the seventies and deserves better.
Wednesday Woodblock
Print & illustration
I print mokuhanga, Japanese water-based woodblock, using cherry plywood, rice paste and a baren rubbed by hand.
Woad & Weft
Textiles & accessories
I keep an indigo vat going in my back yard and feed it like a sourdough starter, which is exactly as odd as it sounds.
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. The natural fleece colours give me eight shades without any dye at all, from near-white to a proper charcoal. Patterns are traditional Fair Isle motifs I learned from my grandmother, worked in the round with no seams. A pair of gloves takes about fifteen hours. I bring the wool undyed and knitted side by side so people can see the connection.
Workshops
Lino printing: one-colour Christmas cards
with Salt Marsh Ceramics · Adults and confident over-12s · 90 min
Cut a simple winter design into soft lino, ink it up and pull your own run of cards on the press. Everyone leaves with six printed cards, envelopes and the block, so you can print more at home.
Sun 29 Nov, 12:00 · Workshop corner, next to A3· 7 places left
Sun 29 Nov, 14:00 · Workshop corner, next to A3· 6 places left
Hand-poured soy candles
with Bench & Bevel · Families, ages 8+ with an adult · 45 min
Pour your own soy candle in a reusable amber jar and blend the scent yourself from a small library of oils. Quick, warm and slightly addictive — a good one to do while someone else in the family shops.
Sun 29 Nov, 12:00 · Workshop corner, next to A9· 10 places left
Sun 29 Nov, 14:00 · Workshop corner, next to A9· 11 places left
Japanese stab-bound notebook
with Hedgerow Millinery · Adults and over-12s · 75 min
Fold, punch and sew a pocket notebook with a four-hole stab binding and a marbled paper cover. No glue, no press, no previous bookbinding — just a needle, waxed thread and a surprisingly satisfying hour.
Sun 29 Nov, 12:00 · Workshop corner, next to C1· 3 places left
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Moderate refunds. Full refund available until 7 days before the event.
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