Goldsmiths' Centre
Clerkenwell’s hub for contemporary jewellery and silversmithing where exhibitions foreground making as much as finished showpieces. Established by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the Centre blends a restored Victorian school with a modern workshop complex to showcase techniques—raising, chasing and repoussé, casting, stone-setting—alongside award-winning work from UK makers.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
Process to Piece
Displays trace a work’s journey from bench drawings and waxes to cast, finished metal and set stones.Follow one object across stages; look for tool marks preserved deliberately as part of the design.
📍 Main gallery vitrines
Contemporary Silversmithing
Hand-raised vessels and sculptural silver show how hammering, planishing and patination create form and surface without casting.Compare the ripples of a hand-raised bowl with a cast piece—identical curves, different ‘fingerprints’.
📍 Tall cases near the Clerkenwell Green entrance side
Jewellery & Setting
Cut stones sit beside sample mounts to explain claw, bezel and pavé settings and why each is chosen.Spot the difference between pavé and micro-pavé under magnification—scale changes the sparkle.
📍 Bench-style displays
Materials & Assay
Panels unpack carat fineness, alloys and the UK hallmarking system, connecting makers’ practice to centuries of quality control.Match a hallmark’s leopard’s head to its meaning; then find the maker’s mark on a displayed piece.
📍 Interpretation wall
Inspire your Friends
- The Centre was created by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths—one of London’s Great Twelve livery companies—continuing a craft education lineage that stretches back to medieval guilds.
- Its Clerkenwell site fuses a restored 19th-century school building with new workshops—an architectural nod to teaching past and present under one roof.
- Exhibitions often pair tools with outcomes—raising stakes, chasing punches and pitch bowls—so visitors can link surface patterns directly to the tools that made them.
- Panels explaining UK hallmarking reference London’s leopard’s head, the town mark used by the London Assay Office since the medieval period.
