Unfitted Kitchen furniture, a recipe from Prue Leith, 2025 dates for South Downs food festival ..read more

Glamour on the Unfitted Kitchen Stage. Still coming down off the high of the first South Downs Food Festival… I can’t stop thinking about ..read more

While covering the evolution of the kitchen over time, I and team of interviewees take a particular look at the success and the limitation ..read more

In the family home or in a restaurant, a table is the site of laughter, tears and strife, triumph and failure. There are signs that they ..read more

Our inaugural South Downs Food Festival is for all the family. Aficionados of delicious food and champagne will be able to spend the day in a magical pop-up village on the terraces of beautiful Stansted House. With their five-mile views the grounds are perfect for the Big Lunch or a picnic. To nourish the mind, we will be holding a programme of live talks on the on the history and future of British food. Cookery demonstrations will be on throughout the day.   A central piazza will house food outlets, trucks and the grand canvas pop-in pub. Stroll down Makers’ Avenue for cooking equipment ..read more

Looking back to when I was studying architecture, I now recognise how little focus there was on making designs for children. Lectures and project topics rarely mentioned them. There is nothing in the architectural history books and little by way of ergonomic studies for children (or kitchen design either, but that is another story). I remember a 1970s exhibition at a London museum called A Child’s Eye View that featured a photograph of a young child crossing a pedestrian bridge with the handrails unreachable and the balusters so widely spaced the child could fall through them off the bridge ..read more

One morning forty years ago, sitting at his wooden drawing board in his studio bedroom in Kensington, Johnny’s unconscious found a word that summed up his frustration at the growing spell of ‘fitted’ to describe a kitchen: ‘Unfitted’. Unfitted was the perfect antidote to what had become the orthodoxy of fitted kitchens. Johnny decided to test this out. He booked a 30 x 40mm advert in The Times newspaper: 'Bored with fitted kitchens? If interested why not try an Unfitted Kitchen? Please call 937 2670 ' 14 words, seven numbers and £300 produced 25 enquiries. Orders followed. Three years later Sm ..read more

A podcast is a great platform for telling stories. Podcasts areways to meet new people and hear all sorts of personal details about their lives, to explore ideas - colourful, unexpected or maybe common sense ones   I am building up a portfolio of interviews of thinkers, historians, writers, artists, architects and many types of craftspeople - also foodies and cooks and those helping make our kitchens rich places and our homes beautiful and gemütlich.   Since I was tiny, I have wanted to make things. The creation of beautiful, usable household objects has occupied my mind and my hand ..read more

On her retirement after three decades, Jill Norman has appointed me to take over as literary executor and trustee of the Elizabeth David estate. This coincides with the seventh anniversary this week of the unveiling of the blue plaque on my aunt’s Chelsea house. It poured with rain that May day when, on behalf of English Heritage, historian Rosemary Hill spoke to a group of us standing on the street. A little red curtain that had been attached to the wall slid open and Dr Hill summed up with this comment: ‘Elizabeth David was taken seriously in a way that no English food writer had been before ..read more

Author: Johnny Grey When I first saw the pictures I had a doubletake. This was a kitchen I designed 18 years ago that had morphed into something new. I blinked a few times and read the email title. It became clear. The kitchen had literally been lifted to a new site. An extraordinary story emerged. Tess and Mike Shaw had acquired through the Used Kitchen Exchange a project I did for clients near Glasgow. They then spent three years devoted to turning it step by step into their dream kitchen, no compromise. This process gives recycling a meaning far beyond saving money, its constraints leading ..read more