Founded in 1998, Sarah Myerscough Gallery is a leading voice in contemporary craft and material-led practice. The gallery represents an international roster of artists working at the intersection of craft, design, and sculpture. Their practices reflect an attunement to cultural relationships with natural materials, particularly wood, combining traditional craftsmanship with innovative approaches that challenge disciplinary boundaries.

Through skills honed in dialogue with material, our artists articulate complex philosophical questions that contextualise our present-day relationship to making. Their practices speak to environmental, social, and cultural representation, often navigating a coexistence with the natural world. In its programming, the gallery invites ongoing reflection on how we embrace the significance of the handmade to foreground the intelligence of materially grounded and conceptually rigorous works.

The gallery continues to foster long-term collaboration with artists, curators, critics, and institutions, and is committed to expanding the role of craft within contemporary culture, representing works from bespoke furniture collections and architectural applications, to dynamic sculpture and installation. In 2024, it presented its first international exhibition at Galerie56 in New York, and its artists’ works are held in significant public and private collections worldwide.The gallery’s programme reflects this ethos across exhibitions, public events, and major international fairs, including TEFAF Maastricht, PAD London, FOG Design + Art San Francisco, and Design Miami.

The Schoolhouse was originally designed in the 1870s as a parochial institute to provide homes and public rooms for the congregation of Saint Mark’s church on North Audley Street to serve the spiritual and educational needs of Mayfair’s growing 19th-century population. Derelict for more than a decade, this striking example of civic architecture will now be sensitively restored and reimagined. ⁠

A richly detailed facade in red brick with gothic arches and oversized oriels faces onto Balderton Street, holding flats which were originally ‘model dwellings’ for parish workers and teachers.

Symmetrical arched openings mark the entrance to the Schoolhouse public rooms, which are set deep into the urban fabric of Mayfair and face the church across a small courtyard. This rear block originally included a soup kitchen, a church hall, premises for the parish working-men’s club, a reading-room and library, and classrooms.

Archive research revealed that the building was designed by R.J.Withers, who also built St. Mary’s, a modest church for the workers of Pimlico and the premises of the Lavers and Barraud stained glass studio on Endell Street, alongside parish churches and schools across the country and this frontispiece for ‘The Church Builder’ (see photos above).

The quality of his work has been rediscovered and championed in recent years by architectural historians Julian Orbach and Edmund Harris, author of ‘Rogue Goths’.

All research can be credited to Carver Haggard.