Reading Design 2026: Proof, Fire and Table

In September, Proof, Fire and Table moves from Grymsdyke Farm to Park Royal Design District as part of Manufactory 2026, continuing the work developed during the 2026 Reading Design Summer School. Rather than simply exhibiting the outcomes of the summer programme, Park Royal becomes the next stage of the same process: a place where the work is developed, remade and activated through making, cooking and gathering. At the centre of the project is a new communal oven designed and made specifically for Park Royal by Grainge Rider Architects with David Hussey. Both an exhibited object and a working piece of infrastructure, the oven will be fired and used throughout the programme, becoming a place around which making, cooking and gathering can take place. The oven extends the investigations begun at Grymsdyke Farm, where Proof, Fire and Table explored a simple question: what is required to make and share a good loaf of bread? Ovens, furniture, tableware, tools and vessels were developed alongside the mixing, proving, baking and sharing of bread, bringing the workshop and kitchen into the same process. Students who participated in the Summer School will return for the Park Royal programme, continuing the collective process of making, cooking and learning established at the Farm. Ash Pales will continue making bread alongside the students and, for a special event, will be joined by architect and designer Nigel Coates to explore the idea of making a city out of bread, bringing architecture and baking together through construction, transformation and collective imagination. Park Royal provides a particularly resonant context for this next stage. Here, manufacturing, food, community and artistic practice exist side by side, with workshops, kitchens, studios, fabricators, food producers and local communities forming part of the same productive ecology. This reflects the concerns at the heart of Proof, Fire and Table, moving between workshop and kitchen, fabrication and cooking, object and meal, individual practice and collective experience. Throughout Manufactory, the installation remains active: the oven is fired, bread is made, objects are used and people gather around the table. The exhibition becomes another site of production rather than simply a place of display. Moving from farm to manufactory, Proof, Fire and Table explores design as something produced through the intersection of material, food, place and community: making things in order to make something happen, whether a fire, a loaf of bread, a meal, a conversation or a community around a table.