Six Emerging Designers to Watch at London Design Festival 2026

Ahead of London Design Festival 2026, which runs from 12 to 20 September across the British capital, Dezeen spotlights six emerging designers reshaping the city's design scene. Tessa Silva, known for vessels made from waste skimmed milk and chalk, presents her Smock project—hand-smocked upholstered furniture—at Max Radford Gallery's Progressive Permanence exhibition in the Christopher Farr showroom in Shoreditch. Mitre & Mondays, founded in 2019 by Freya Bolton, Josef Shanley-Jackson, and Finn Thomson, reconstructs its Wood for the Trees exhibition at Shoreditch Tab Centre and designs the scenography for the Design Museum's Mineral exhibition using reusable stone offcuts from a Lincolnshire quarry. Georgia Merritt, a Goldsmiths fine art graduate (2020) and gilding apprentice, creates trompe l'œil faux marble furniture from fibreboard. Self-taught carpenter Ralph Parks crafts alternative timber pieces, including a cabinet inspired by underwater fossils and a shelf from abandoned wood. Lewis Kemmenoe collages wood, copper, and aluminium into patchworked furniture. Barnaby Lewis, a former carpenter turned blacksmith, shows at Brompton Design District's Studio Iron, founded by artist Isamaya Ffrench. The article originally appeared in Dezeen Dispatch magazine at LDF 2026.