Goldsmiths' Centre
What Visitors Say
Fantastic place to come and work or to have a bite to eat and coffee with really friendly and welcoming staff! Great food and coffee. Perfect environment to work away on your laptop or to meet a colleague.
Wonderful opportunity to see the work of the next generation of designers. Accessible and a great cafe.
We had delicious sweets and café in a large beautiful space. The muffins and egg tarts were delicious.
Highlights
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
Opening Hours
Fun Facts
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.
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