London Calling
London Calling: A Creative Pilgrimage
There's something about arriving in London that makes the creative heart beat a little faster. Perhaps it's the layers of history pressed into every cobblestone, every shopfront, every tucked-away lane that surprises you when you least expect it. Or perhaps it's simply knowing that around any corner, something beautiful might be waiting.
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We've come to London for the Licensing Fair at the Design Centre in Islington; a gathering of the creative world in one of the city's most inspired precincts. It's the kind of event that reminds you why you do what you do. Illustrations and patterns and stories covering every wall. Wonderful, friendly people, all with that British sense of humour. Conversations with people who understand the particular joy of a beautifully designed thing. But if you know us, you know that any trip becomes a creative expedition the moment we land. So even before the fair begins in earnest, we're already collecting ideas: window displays, packaging details, tiny colour pairings and textures that somehow say London in a single glance. |
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London for us means paper. It means wandering into stores that make your hands reach before your brain catches up. There is something about the weight of a beautiful notebook, the texture of a handmade card, the quiet luxury of a considered stationery range that speaks directly to everything we love about what we do at Affirmations.
We find ourselves drawn into the gorgeous chaos of Paperchase (old habits), the quiet wonder of Choosing Keeping in Bloomsbury with its extraordinary collection of pencils and papers from around the world, and the inevitable, irresistible pull of the London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden, a place that should really carry a warning sign for artists. Abandon budgets, all ye who enter here.
There are the unexpected discoveries too… the ones no map could have predicted. A narrow shop selling Japanese washi. A market stall with hand-marbled papers that look like watercolours. A bookshop basement yielding old, illustrated editions that become instant reference and inspiration.
They are usually the quietest moments of the day, and somehow the most memorable — the places you duck into for ten minutes and emerge from half an hour later feeling as though your creative compass has been reset.
We carry a notebook (naturally) and fill it with swatches, sketches, colour combinations, packaging ideas, and fragments of sentences that might one day become a Twigseeds message or a card that lands in just the right hands at just the right moment.
Those little findings always matter more than you think they will. Months later, back in the studio, they reappear as mood, tone, pattern, and palette — quiet souvenirs turning themselves into new work.
That's the gift of a trip like this. The world opens itself up as a studio, and you realise that inspiration isn't something that lives only at your desk or in your garden at Cottonwood. It's everywhere. It's in the typeface on a Soho awning, the colour palette of a Georgian terrace, the extraordinary stationery in the hotel room that makes you stop and actually feel the paper.
The Licensing Fair itself is a world within a world; a reminder that creativity is a living, breathing economy of ideas. We come looking for connections, for kindred spirits, for those conversations that begin "what do you do?" and end two hours later with something shifting quietly in your chest.
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We come home full. Full of ideas, full of colour, full of the particular tiredness that only good travel brings. There's a lovely moment on the flight back when everything begins to settle into place. Pages of notes, camera rolls full of references, conversations replaying themselves, and the first sense of which ideas might want to grow once we're home again. And we can't wait to tell you what comes next… |
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These photos are from our previous times showcasing at Progressive Greetings Live in London.
