Finding London Through Design: Reflections from London Design Festival 2026

22 September 2026 | Words by Anshuman Pandey, Designer at tangerine

As someone new to life in London, this year’s Design Festival became an introduction to the city itself. Following a trail of open studios, temporary installations and hidden spaces across its design districts, I found myself exploring neighbourhoods I might otherwise have overlooked.

What struck me most was how little the festival felt like a spectacle. Instead, it offered a rare glimpse behind the scenes of London’s design culture, opening the doors of studios, workshops and independent practices that are usually hidden from view. The result was something surprisingly grounded: a real-time snapshot of a creative community examining, refining and reshaping its own future.

 

Brompton Design District

Together, these installations made the strongest case for craft as one of the festival’s defining themes.

Craft x Tech, V&A

Brompton set the tone for the whole week. At the V&A, Craft x Tech paired individual designers with Japanese artisans, each collaboration built around a single craft. What stayed with me wasn’t the technology angle so much as the opposite: how much the pairings leaned into restraint, letting centuries-old technique shape a genuinely useful, modern object rather than the other way around. The result felt less like heritage applied as aesthetic effect and more like honed craft genuinely shaping contemporary design.

Perfectly Imperfect, The Lavery

At The Lavery, Perfectly Imperfect turned the same idea of craft meeting product into something more intimate. Jesse Butterfield, standing next to his now-iconic stool marked with flame scorching across its surface, explained how it came to be: an accidental discovery during testing that he chose to keep rather than correct. Hearing him describe that moment of discovery, and the decision to preserve it rather than sand it away, revealed something photographs of the finished piece never quite could.

Elsewhere in the same exhibition, a collection of resin works challenged my own assumptions about the material. Slip-cast into cylindrical and spherical forms, the pieces felt less synthetic and more geological, giving resin a weight and permanence I hadn’t previously associated with it.

One Tool, One Stool

The show closed with the Royal College of Art’s One Tool One Stool. Flooded with daylight, the exhibition space became part of the experience itself. The stools appeared almost in silhouette, reducing each design to its simplest expression of material and form.

 

From Holborn to Soho

A quick coffee, a landmark pavilion and a showroom visit brought together three very different aspects of the festival, connected by a shared appreciation for thoughtful, understated design.

Ceramic Mugs & Cedarwood Tray, Slowform x Café Vins

A quick stop for coffee turned into one of the week’s most satisfying design moments. Café Vins had just launched a set of Japanese-inspired ceramic mugs alongside a cedarwood tray developed with Slowform. The pairing had clearly been designed as a single experience rather than two separate objects. Each mug located precisely within a shallow recess carved into the tray, eliminating the need for a lip or rim. It was an unassuming detail, but one that could only emerge through observing and testing how people actually use an object rather than simply styling it.

The Pangolin Shield, Studio Saar & Atelier One

Recharged, I followed the trail to The Pangolin Shield, Studio Saar and Atelier One’s landmark pavilion on the Strand. What drew me in was personal: my own Indian heritage. The Anglo-Indian studio built the structure around a lightweight bamboo gridshell, engineered by Atelier One, whose work has helped establish bamboo as a credible structural material. Across the frame, like the overlapping scales of the pangolin it’s named after, are two forms of protection, layered together: cane police shields and the woven rain shields traditionally used by farmers in north-east India, filtering daylight into shifting patterns beneath.

What made it land, though, was the setting. Facing the Indian High Commission and steps from Somerset House, the pavilion sits within a landscape shaped by colonial history and takes objects associated with authority, protection and shelter, quietly reworking them into shared public space. No grand statement, just reflection through material and context.

One Room, Many Makers, ARAM Store

A short walk later, I arrived at ARAM, where One Room, Many Makers brought together local designers responding to the same challenge: to transform ordinary, off-the-shelf materials through ingenuity rather than excess.

The intelligence of the work lay in its restraint. Whether through a rethought connection, a revised finish or an unexpected use of material, the exhibition demonstrated how meaningful innovation often emerges from small interventions rather than wholesale reinvention. It also drew an impressive crowd from London’s furniture design community, reinforcing the value that designers continue to place on carefully considered, practical ideas.

 

Shoreditch

If Holborn and Soho were about singular, considered gestures, Shoreditch was the opposite: a whole neighbourhood turned inside out, studios and showrooms thrown open so that pieces and the people who made them ended up standing next to each other, in conversations as unplanned as the district itself.

The Product Design 100 by Design Burger

The standout was Design Burger’s exhibition marking the launch of The Product Design 100, a 324-page monograph eight years in the making by the platform’s founders, independent designers themselves. The show gathered a tight room of pieces from the book, but the real substance was in the talks alongside it: a line-up including Tej Chauhan and André Poulheim, where the recurring thread, despite this year leaning hard into AI, was that AI remains a tool; craft and attention to detail are still what separate a considered object from a merely clever one.  A theme touched on in tangerine’s own LDF 2026 panel discussion hosted by Gowling WLG.

House of Icon, Material Matters & WAX

Around the corner, House of Icon and Material Matters gave space almost entirely to individual and emerging designers, offering rougher, more experimental takes on material innovation and recyclability than anything in the museums. Closing the day was WAX, the four-floor former wax-and-shellac factory turned permanent home for independent British brands, established names and newer labels sharing one roof across furniture, lighting and lamps, proof a shared address can do as much for a scene as any single showpiece.

 

A Slower Ending

The final stretch of the festival offered a quieter pace. At MADE x Barbican, vintage furniture sat alongside sketches and mood boards that revealed the thinking behind each piece. Nearby, twentytwentyone’s exhibition celebrating the life and work of Miguel Milá demonstrated a remarkable consistency across materials, scales and typologies, from lighting and furniture to everyday objects. The day ended at Yorkton Workshop, where seeing Charlie Humble’s work alongside the neighbouring Pearson Lloyd studio served as a reminder of how interconnected London’s design community remains.

 

Until Next Year

A week of exhibitions, conversations and discoveries later, what stays with me isn’t any single object, installation or talk. It’s the sense of a city slowly letting me in, door by door and district by district.

As someone new to London, the festival became more than a celebration of design. It became an introduction to the people, places and ideas that shape the city. Nine days later, I find myself feeling a little more settled here than I did before it began.

Until next year LDF,
Anshuman

—

Edited by Laurie Bushe, Associate Director, Marketing and Communications