Peter Dormer Lecture 2026

Monday 7 December 2026 – 6.30pm

Location: Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Dyson Building, Royal College of Art, 1 Hester Road, Battersea, London SW11 4AY

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Join us for this year’s annual Peter Dormer Lecture, one of the leading events in Applied Art in the UK, delivered by Neal Shasore at the Royal College of Art in London.

What is the role of craft in education and in building our cities? Peter Dormer had strong views on art schools and skills and embraced a broad understanding of craft. In this lecture Neal Shasore takes on these interests to think through historical ideas of craft and education to think about their relevance in making the contemporary city.

In the first part of the lecture, Shasore will explore the status of craft in architectural and built environment education, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular at the London County Council’s School of Building through to our present moment, as he sets out a vision for a new School of Building. How can some of the radical arguments of WR Lethaby and Beresford Pite - respectively professors of ornament and architecture at the Royal College of Art, progenitors and protagonists of the Brixton School, reinspire us today? Shasore will call for a restitution of the ideal of the polytechnic in a moment where existing models of further and higher education are under increasing strain.

In the second part, Shasore will discuss the idea of ‘City Craft’ – a programme to reestablish the integration of crafts – applied, decorative and building crafts – in the life of the City, in the slipstream of design and development. Indeed, how craft could express diversity, hybridity and resistance in the public realm, and embrace flexibility, mutability, and re-inscription in places and spaces. Moreover, he will posit ‘city craft’ as a political imaginary in deliberate contrast to ‘statecraft,’ and explore how craft might influence the shape of a different economy, especially in relation to small batch production.  

Biography

Dr Neal Shasore is a historian of the built environment and advocate for heritage and craft. His research has focussed on architecture, design and craft in twentieth century Imperial Britain: his first book, Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London was published by Oxford University Press. He is a trustee of the Architectural Heritage Fund and the Crafts Study Centre and sits on Historic England’s Advisory Committee and is an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA. Following positions at the Universities of Westminster, Liverpool and Oxford, for four years he served as Chief Executive and Head of School of the London School of Architecture. He has recently founded the School of Building to focus on conservation, craft and construction.

About the Peter Dormer Lecture

The Peter Dormer Lecture  is the UK’s major annual applied arts lecture, held in memory of Peter Dormer, the writer and critic who died in 1996. Organised by a committee of his friends, colleagues, and specialists in craft disciplines, the lecture aims to continue the debate about applied art and society that was central to Dormer’s concerns. Peter Dormer’s writings embraced craft, art, architecture, design, technology and education; and his critical and curatorial work helped to promote the crafts into the free-flowing currents of postmodern visual culture. Previous speakers have included Edmund de Waal, Grayson Perry, Julia Bryan Wilson, Glenn Adamson, Alison Britton, Deirdre Figueiredo, Gus Casely-Hayford and last year, Jasleen Kaur, RCA Jewellery & Metal graduate and Turner Prize winner.