One of the best-loved events in the design industry calendar, Clerkenwell Design Week is a three-day annual festival gathering Clerkenwell’s long-established design community together. Now in its sixth year, the event has increasingly become a must go-to showcase for the UK and international design community. 

The name Clerkenwell comes from the Clerks’ Well in Farringdon Lane, where London parish clerks performed the famous Medieval Mystery Plays throughout the Middle Ages. Since the Industrial Revolution, the area has housed craft workshops, printers, clockmakers and jewellers. Traditional crafts, such as printing and bookbinding still flourish, as do graphic designers. In the last two decades, Clerkenwell’s unique variety buildings have been transformed into central studio, showroom and workshop spaces, attracting an unprecedented concentration of architectural, design and creative practices. The global businesses that have made Clerkenwell their home have shaped the area into the UK’s most important generator of creativity and innovation. Serving an infinite variety of other industries easily accessible from across London, Clerkenwell has become home to a plethora of new media agencies, graphic and interactive design studios and more than 200 architectural practices - more per square mile than anywhere else on the planet. In addition, Clerkenwell houses over 60 design showrooms including world leaders Vitra, Poltrona Frau, Knoll and Steelcase.

19 – 21 May 2015; all around Clerkenwell, London UK; free to register; metro: Barbican, Farringdon; i: clerkenwelldesignweek.com