Collect returns to Somerset House from 24 to 28 February 2027, previews on the 24th and 25th, the fair open from the 26th.
The Crafts Council began in 1971 as the Crafts Advisory Committee, set up to advise the Minister for the Arts on the needs of the artist craftsman and to raise national interest in what they made. It bought premises in Waterloo Place in 1973 and built an index of British craftspeople the year after, and it has spent half a century arguing that craft belongs in the same conversation as art rather than in a category below it. Collect is the commercial expression of that argument.
The fair is unusual in that almost everything on it was made in the last five years and almost all of it is for sale. There is no historical material and no secondary market, so a collector is buying from living makers at the point their work is entering museum collections rather than after it has, and the international galleries that show craft bring their strongest pieces because the buyers here are curators as often as private clients.
The 2027 fair is at Somerset House from 24 to 28 February, with the 24th and 25th as preview days. Collect Open runs alongside it, a strand given to ambitious craft-led installations shown as single commissions rather than on gallery stands. Somerset House gives the fair rooms rather than a hall, so it is walked as a series of chambers.