Home Workshops, Courses and Talks

Thursdays 6.30 - 8.30pm
Autumn Term: 13 September - 18 October & 1 November - 6 December | £330

The Thursday evening pottery programme brings new and experienced potters together with a professional potter.

The classes were established by Mary Watts in the 19th century. Come along to the studio to create your own ideas or with the help of our potter, try hand-building and working from moulds. Make work to sell at our Christmas Weekend.

Thursdays 6.30pm - 8.30pm
Autumn Term: 13 September - 18 October & 1 November - 6 December | £330
Pre-booking required
Led by Jane Allison

Classes take place in the historic galleries and studios, and are suitable for beginners and improvers. Materials and equipment are included.

The collections and exhibitions are used to inspire and to learn technical drawing skills. There are opportunities to work from a life model across the term.

Friday 5 October | 11am - 4pm | £75

Friends £67.50 | Led by potter Jonathan Chiswell Jones

Take inspiration from The De Morgan Collection on display here at the Artists’ Village and design and glaze your own 6 inch square lusterware tile.

Materials and tea/coffee included. Bring your own lunch or visit our Tea Shop. Spaces are limited and must be pre-booked.

Saturday 13 October

11am – 4pm | £75 | Friends £67.50 Led by Florabundance artist Vicki Oldfield

An introduction to printmaking using professional printing presses. Create different kinds of print, taking inspiration from the Florabundance exhibition.

Materials and tea/coffee included. Bring your own lunch or visit our Tea Shop. Spaces are limited and must be pre-booked.

Mondays, 17 September - 15 October | 11am - 1pm 

£170 | Friends £153 

Led by Hilary Underwood

This course celebrates individuals who created extraordinary works with almost compulsive energy despite learning disabilities or serious mental illness. Some, like Richard Dadd, had professional training – others were self-taught, worked privately or in the unpromising settings of asylums and psychiatric hospitals. Van Gogh helped to define modern painting while others are slowly gaining the recognition they deserve as ‘Outsider Artists.’

Monday 17 September | James Henry Pullen 

Monday 24 September | Fantasy Architecture

Monday 1 October | Van Gogh

Monday 8 October | Cynthia Weldon

Monday 15 October | Richard Dadd

Wednesday 26 September | 7 – 8pm | £12.50 | Friends £11.25

Watts Gallery | Pre-booking required

Annie Cobden-Sanderson was the daughter of Victorian statesman Richard Cobden and wife of T J Sanderson, co-founder with Emery Walker of the Doves Press and friends with William Morris and Jane Burden. 

Annie was instrumental in advancing the cause of female suffrage and her imprisonment in 1906 prompted a wave of protest; George Bernard Shaw called her ‘one of the nicest women in England suffering from the coarsest indignity’. 

In this talk, historian and biographer Marianne Tidcombe, will bring to light Annie’s extraordinary life and her friendship with other advocates of women’s suffrage in the Arts & Crafts movement.

Wednesday 3 October | 7 – 8pm | £25.00 | Friends £22.50

Watts Gallery | Pre-booking required

Henry Marsh was one of Britain’s foremost brain surgeons and has spent four decades operating on the human brain. Since retiring from full-time work in the NHS, he has continued to operate and lecture abroad, in Nepal, Albania and Ukraine. His prize-winning memoir, Do No Harm, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He has been the subject of two award-winning documentary films, Your Life in Their Hands and The English Surgeon and he was made a CBE in 2010. In his searing and provocative memoir he reflects on the experiences that have shaped his career and life, gaining a deeper understanding of what matters to us all in the end.

Wednesday 17 October | 7 – 8pm | £12.50 | Friends £11.25 

Watts Gallery | Pre-booking required

Ada Lovelace was a woman ahead of her time. The daughter of Lord Byron she was introduced to mathematics - becoming the protégée of mathematician Charles Babbage, expanding many of his theories, and predicting the dawn of the computer era.

Author Miranda Seymour reveals Ada’s connections to Surrey where she lived for much of her married life. Ada’s story is told in Miranda’s latest book, In Byron’s Wake, she has also written 

Wednesday 21 November | 7 – 8 pm | £12.50 | Friends £11.25

Watts Gallery | Pre-booking required

Hear about Etta Lemon, the forgotten and remarkable woman who led the anti-plumage campaign supported by G F Watts for half a century, leading it to eventual victory. She campaigned so doggedly, and for so long, against ‘murderous millinery’ that she became known as ‘Mother of the Birds’. Her struggle to get the world to care about birds met with as much contempt and indifference as Emmeline Pankhurst’s fight for the vote. Right up until WWI, the idea of bird protection was as laughable as the concept of female emancipation. Yet she has proved to be as deeply influential to the modern psyche as the elaborately plumed leader of the suffragettes, Mrs Pankhurst.

Tessa Boase is a journalist and author of the successful A Housekeeper’s Tale. Previously a commissioning editor for The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Weekend magazine, she continues to contribute to a wide range of national newspapers and magazines.

Thursdays 6.30 - 8.30pm
Winter Term: 17 January – 14 February & 28 February – 28 March
£300 | Friends £270
Led by Jane Allison | Pre-booking required

Join us for a term for our Drawing courses. Classes take place in the historic galleries and studios, and are suitable for beginners and improvers.

The collections and exhibitions are used to inspire and to learn technical drawing skills. There are opportunities to work from a life model across the term.

Materials and tea/coffee included. Spaces are limited and must be pre-booked.

Thursdays 6.30 - 8.30pm
Winter Term: Thursdays, 17 January – 14 February & 28 February – 28 March | £300 | Friends £270
Pre-booking required

The Thursday evening pottery programme brings new and experienced potters together with a professional potter.

The classes were established by Mary Watts in the 19th century. Come along to the studio to create your own ideas or with the help of our potter, try hand-building and working from moulds.

Materials and tea/coffee included. Spaces are limited and must be pre-booked.

Mondays, 7 January – 4 February | 11am - 1pm
Watts Gallery
£170 | Friends £153

Our winter course will be titled Pre-Raphaelite Sister: Christina Rossetti & Art.

More information coming soon.