LONDON CRAFT WEEK AT ALICE BILLING HOUSE: MADE OF PLACE WITH BEVERLEY SOMMERVILLE

As part of London Craft Week, Alice Billing House welcomed ceramic artist and former Artist in Residence Beverley Sommerville back to the building for a week-long exhibition and participatory workshop exploring heritage, materiality, and collective memory through clay.

Beverley’s practice explores ideas of material and place by gathering elements from locations that hold personal or historical significance and incorporating them into ceramic works. Originally from the East Coast and now based in Cheshire, her work captures the essence of time and place, embedding stories and memories within the objects themselves.

During her residency at Alice Billing House, Beverley applied this approach to explore the heritage of the Grade II-listed building, originally constructed in 1905–1906 to house the West Ham Fire Brigade. Following the restoration and reopening of the South Block as artist studios in 2024, and with the North Block set for redevelopment into additional creative workspaces in 2026/27, the building is currently undergoing a significant moment of transformation.

Over several days, Beverley explored the building in detail, often working in low light with a torch in hand, collecting soot, ashes, debris, and fragments of brick, slate, glass, and metal from across the site. These gathered materials formed a unique archive that became central to her creative process.

The resulting exhibition, Made of Place – The Secret Lives of Alice Billing House, brought together Beverley’s ceramic works alongside the collected material archive, revealing connections between the building’s past, present, and future. The exhibition invited visitors to reflect on how buildings carry memory, and how materials themselves can hold traces of people, histories, and change.

The week culminated in a hands-on workshop where participants created ceramic pieces inspired by contemporary 21st-century icons as part of the ongoing Alice Billing House Time Capsule Project. Attendees decorated ceramic forms using materials gathered from the site itself, embedding present-day stories into the future fabric of the building.

Each participant created one piece to keep, while additional works became part of a collective ceramic garland contributing to the Time Capsule Project — an ambitious artist-led initiative that invites the local community to reflect on what heritage means today and how we wish to be remembered 100 years from now. The time capsule will be sealed in 2026 and reopened in 2106, exactly two centuries after the building’s original construction.

Through exhibition, making, and community participation, the project transformed the evolving story of Alice Billing House into a living ceramic archive connecting past, present, and future.

A huge thank you to Beverley for sharing her incredible practice, generosity of spirit, and knowledge throughout the week, and thank you to everyone who visited the exhibition and took part in the workshop. It was wonderful to see so many people engaging with the history of the building and contributing to the evolving story of Alice Billing House.

What Beverley says

“ In the quiet, before the doors opened to the exhibition, I felt very proud to have my ceramic work sitting in the place from where it was born, it was a moment of connection, understanding and a little humbling, that these materials gathered from the site should now take on a new chapter to tell the story of the firemen and Alice Billing.”

The creativity of those folks that joined the workshop was overwhelming, bringing a group of strangers together with some basic tools, materials and information, sharing some ideas and some meaning to the project and letting them fly. 

They showed such understanding and energy for the Time Capsule Project and brought their own ideas of what 21st century means for them, it was so inspirational. The camaraderie in the group was great to see, the exchange of support and ideas, the fun of turning what was going to be a map outline into the Milky Way was a joy to be part of.

So many, many thanks to Marguerite and the folks at Grow studios for their support and belief in my work; it means the world.”