Twickenham’s Riverside Gallery fills with 60 makers for its annual Christmas Market
Twice a year, the Octagon Room that Nellie Ionides saved from demolition nearly a century ago gets filled with cardigans, candles and candlesticks instead of portraits. On Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 December, Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham holds its annual Christmas Shopping Weekend, and this year the market has grown to more than 60 pitches spread across the gallery, its stables and an outdoor courtyard market.
The event is free, runs from 10am to 5pm both days, and needs no booking. Richmond council describes it as a chance to meet the makers behind the goods, not just buy them, and the gallery’s own list of traders backs that up: more than fifty named studios and small businesses, from Zoe’s Clay and Karen Helle Ceramics to Jawbone Brewing and Condiments Kitchen, each running their own stall rather than selling through a shared table.
The range on offer stretches from millinery and letterpress printing to portrait painting and small-batch confectionery. Chalk Jewellery, Nibu Letterpress, Bee Smith Millinery, Suzanne Lycett Portraits and Spitalfields Candles sit alongside florists, photographers and textile designers, with the gallery’s own courtyard hosting a separate outdoor food and gift market running throughout both days. Local community choirs will perform live across the weekend, and the Stables Café stays open for anyone who needs a break between stalls.
The Orleans House Gallery’s market coincides with the opening of the gallery’s Winter Show, an open-call exhibition in the Stables Gallery for artists who live, work or study in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, giving shoppers a second reason to make the trip beyond the stalls themselves.
The gallery’s own history makes the market feel like a natural use of the space rather than a one-off event grafted on top of it. The surviving Octagon Room, designed by James Gibbs in 1716, is one of the only pieces left of a riverside villa built in 1710 for the politician James Johnston. The rest of the house was demolished in 1926 by a firm of gravel merchants, and the Octagon Room itself only survived because Nellie Ionides, who lived next door, bought it to stop the site being redeveloped. She left the building and her collection of local art to the old Borough of Twickenham when she died in 1962, and the gallery opened to the public a decade later, in 1972. It is the same gallery that, this autumn, opened its doors to teenagers through a new Youth Collective, asking them to help shape what happens inside its walls next.
Parking is not available on site, so visitors arriving by car should expect to find space nearby rather than at the gallery itself. The gallery is a ten-minute walk from both St Margaret’s and Twickenham stations.
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