Liberty London Design Studio

What an amazing day! The four 4 of us Liberty Open Call winners were invited to the Liberty headquarters to meet and discuss the next stages in creating our designs into iconic Liberty fabrics.

The day began walking through a labyrinth of corridors and step levels making our way towards the heart of the office, on the back of the main building we know as the luxurious department store, ‘Liberty’.

“To this day a voyage of discovery awaits on the good ship Liberty, with history hidden amongst six floors of cutting edge design, unexpected edits and beautiful wares from the world’s greatest crafts people.”

-Liberty London

Incredibly the shop itself was created from the timbers of two battleships, The HMS Impregnable- built from 3040 with 100 year old oak from the New Forest and HMS Hindustan.

On top of the store is the infamous copper gilded weathervane of a golden ship, The Mayflower, responsible for transporting pilgrims to the New World 1620.

During our time 'backstage' at Liberty we had access to some of the amazing archives and we saw beautiful fabrics dating back decades, including the part of the archive our designs would be stored alongside Grayson Perry's designs!

The archive has over 50,000 designs dating back to the early 18th century. Back then, many of Liberty's fabrics were made using traditional methods of printing with carved wooden blocks to create repeats in pattern.

It was so fun to see how sections of my painting Graffiti Summer could be lifted off.