The brainchild of Sir Terence Conran and the store’s creative director Polly Dickens, Handcrafted came about as a result of the pair’s laudable desire to counter our increasingly homogenous, throwaway society, at the same time as promoting craft as an industry.

‘It’s important that we support craft in the UK because it is the only way Britain can revive manufacturing while developing a luxury goods market,’ says Conran. ‘If successful, what starts off as craftspeople making things on a small scale can become an industry of its own.’ Dickens agrees. ‘The craft industry works on a ripple effect,’ she explains. ‘With Handcrafted we’re promoting the assistants of the top makers – as these people become better known, they will go on to get their own studios and train their own assistants.’

Laikingland is making ripples already. A creative collaboration founded by artist/designer Martin Smith and engineer Nick Regan, it now employs several designers and artists, as well as a team of skilled craftsmen who assemble the delightfully engaging kinetic objects. And that’s no small task. Martin Smith’s Applause Machine, for example, consists of over 50 components, while the Perspex elements in John Lumbus’s charming Storm in a Delft Tea Cup (turn the handle and the golden boat rides the mechanical waves while storm clouds periodically reveal a bolt of lightning) call for the specialist polishing skills of jewellery making. ‘I came across these guys in a Dutch enclave of the Milan Furniture Fair earlier this year,’ Polly Dickens explains [Nick Regan is based in the Netherlands], ‘and I was fascinated by their work – each piece is so light-hearted and beautifully made that you just have to play with them.’

By Charlotte Abrahams, Crafts Magazine, Issue No. 227, November/December 2010.

Handcrafted in Britain is at The Conran Shop, Michelin House, 81 Fulham Rd, London SW3 6RD 020-7589 7401