Open Studios at SDW: Behind the Doors of Sheffield's Creatives
The City Opens Up
Open Studios is one of those events that defines Sheffield Design Week’s character. The format is simple — creative practitioners across the city open their studio doors to the public — but the cumulative effect is powerful. Walking from studio to studio during the 2015 programme, I built a picture of Sheffield’s creative culture that no single exhibition could provide.
The route took in spaces across the city: from the purpose-built studios at Persistence Works to improvised workshops in railway arches, from shared offices in converted industrial buildings to home studios in Walkley and Heeley. Each stop revealed a different working practice, a different set of constraints, a different relationship between maker and space.
Seeing the Process
What makes Open Studios valuable is the access it provides to process. A finished object in a gallery tells you what a designer produced. A studio visit tells you how and why. I remember visiting a letterpress studio where the ink-stained walls, the organised trays of type, and the presses themselves told a story of sustained practice that the finished prints could only hint at.
Another visit took me to a jeweller’s workshop — barely larger than a kitchen table — where I watched the precise, methodical process of setting a stone. The maker explained each step while working, and the intimacy of the scale was genuinely moving. This was making at its most honest and purposeful.
Community Made Visible
Open Studios revealed something important about Sheffield’s creative geography. The city’s makers are distributed across neighbourhoods rather than concentrated in a single quarter. This dispersal means that creative culture is woven into the fabric of residential areas, not segregated from them. It is a quality that distinguishes Sheffield from cities with more formalised creative districts.
The event connected naturally to the Craftworks exhibition and Made in Sheffield, offering the behind-the-scenes context for the finished work on display elsewhere. For anyone wanting to understand the city’s maker community, Open Studios remains the most direct route in.
