Lily Crowther

Teaching craft skills in the building trades: the Museum of Construction & Building Materials and its legacies

I am a curator specialising in 19th– and 20th-century craft and design. I am currently Curator (History) at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, and previously worked at the V&A, including on the galleries of studio ceramics and 20th century design, and the exhibition British Design 1948-2012. I have taught in the Art History department at Oxford Brookes University, and on the Krasis programme of interdisciplinary object-based seminars at the Ashmolean Museum. I am also a trustee of the Brooking Museum of Architectural Detail. My research interests are in material knowledge, the communication of skill through objects and collections, and the making of the built environment.

My supervisors are Professor William Whyte, University of Oxford, and Dr Simona Valeriani, V&A.

Selected publications and exhibitions

Built with malice aforethought: Leamington Spa and the Black Atlantic, exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, May–September 2024 

‘Innovation and Revivalism: Powell & Sons’ Opus Sectile Mosaic’, Journal of Design History 36:2 (June 2023), pp. 109–124 

Making Histories: new responses to the ceramics collection, exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, March–November 2020 

 ‘Crafting Suburbia’, chapter in Helland, Lemire & Buis (eds.) Craft, Community and the Material Culture of Place and Politics, Routledge, 2014 

 Award-winning British Design, V&A Publishing, 2012

 

Image: Testing the strength of Colonel Scott’s ‘newly invented’ cement, for the Museum of Construction © Victoria and Albert Museum