Study event review: Interior Design & Garden Design

On a sunny Saturday in November a group of Interior Design and Garden Design students and tutors met up at the Royal Festival Hall on Londons’ SouthBank. It was a long anticipated event (delayed somewhat by Covid) that some had been looking forward to for two years!

The first part of the day was spent honing site surveying skills, doing some sketch plans and measuring, taking photos and making observations; with Interior Design students exploring an the lower ground floor of the Festival Hall, and Garden Design branching out and investigating the area around the London Eye and Jubilee Gardens just along the river.

After a well deserved lunch break and a wander through a great installation outside the Hayward Gallery, we walked along the Thames, stopping in to see the beautiful timber-textured concrete interior of the National Theatre, and ending up outside Tate Modern at Bankside to do some urban sketching before the sun went down.

The whole day was a great opportunity to practise spatial design skills, observe the busy environment and explore the riverside in London, but more than anything it was a chance for students to meet up and enjoy each other’s company, chat about spatial design – both interior and exterior – and build their own peer-networks.

We’re aiming to run more of these events, and we’d love more students to be involved, so if it sounds like something you’d like to do please add to the comments below. We’re open to suggestions for different types of events in the future; it doesn’t have to be a site surveying workshop or a skills based event, it could just as usefully be visiting a relevant exhibition, investigating existing built spaces or checking out a design festival. The most important part of the day was meeting fellow students and getting to know each other in person, making connections and starting conversations that will carry on beyond the day itself.

I asked for feedback from the students who came and one said  “​​I think what we did was just perfect” – so let’s just say we’ll have some more perfect events soon, and thanks so much to everyone who came – I hope you all  enjoyed it as much as I did!