London Design Festival 2025

Sacred Grounds (19–21 Sept) at Paradox Design + Coffee invites visitors to collage, weave, write, and record, reimagining sacred spaces through wellbeing and a collective Slow Design Wall. While you create, you can enjoy and purchase Paradox’s limited-edition Sacred Grounds coffee blend, crafted especially for the festival.

Over three days, the café becomes a studio for reflection and making, where visitors are invited to reimagine mosques and community places through the lens of the Five Ways to Wellbeing: Connect, Notice, Give, Learn, and Be Active.

Guided by the principle that form follows feeling, guests respond to open prompts through hands-on creative practices. The tools remain the same each day: collage, weaving, zine-making, and audio recording — but the prompts and themes shift daily, giving visitors fresh entry points into slow, sensory design.

Across all three days, visitors may:

• Collage: A5 artworks made with magazines, cut-outs, text, and fabrics.
• Weaving: Simple card looms with fabric scraps and thread, curating colour and texture.
• Audio: Short recordings of words, stories, or memories that will form part of a collective film.
• The Slow Design Wall: A living installation that grows across the three days, weaving all contributions into a shared tapestry of imagination and belonging.

Day 2 – Designing from Agency
Prompt: If this mosque or community space were yours, what would it hold/facilitate?
The second day foregrounds self-agency and ownership. Prompts invite people to imagine without limit, if the building's activity was specifically curated by them.

By dusk, the Slow Design Wall is at its most layered — fabric, text, postcards, collages, and voices curate a group artwork.

Sacred Grounds is both an exhibition and an invitation — a space where coffee and conversation meet creativity and care. It remains free and accessible to anyone curious to join. Each contribution, whether a textile, a colour palette, or a postcard to the future, becomes part of a shared work that honours memory, nurtures presence, and imagines new possibilities.

✨ Sign up via Eventbrite: Sacred Grounds – Day 2: Designing for Agency

Image courtesy of Paradox Design + Coffee