Zed AlleyClayhouse

Zed Alley Clayhouse opened in 2023 inside a two-hundred-year-old listed building in the Christmas Steps Arts Quarter that has previously served as a sailors' pub and a print works. Founders Damian and Ali Eley, who came to pottery from structural engineering and charity work respectively, built dedicated classrooms for hand-building and wheel-throwing alongside a members' studio for potters who already know their way around a kiln. Foundation courses run for six or twelve weeks, alongside one-day and two-day workshops for people trying the wheel for the first time. Eight resident potters and three ceramics technicians, several trained at the Royal College of Art and Bath Spa University, teach across the programme. The building's Georgian proportions and tall windows give the studio more daylight than the cramped railway-arch pottery spaces common elsewhere in the city.