CSM staff and students braved the cold to help out at the King’s Cross Skip Garden, based behind our new building.

The movable Skip Garden at King’s Cross consists of seven construction skips which have been transformed into mini gardens including an orchard, a wormery, a poly-tunnel skip, a herb skip and three crop-rotation skips. They are gardened by volunteers and young people from the local area, many of whom don’t have gardens of their own.

Volunteers from Central Saint Martins got involved in painting a shed that will provide a space for gardeners to take a break and reflect on their handywork.

Find out more about Green Week 2012
Visit our new sustainability site
Find out more about the King’s Cross Skip Garden

Here are some recent photos of our new building at King’s Cross. We’re not open to the public yet, we’ll let you when we are.

All images are by John Sturrock.

Click the thumbnails below to view large versions of the images.

Find out more about our move

Katie Grand and Love Magazine joined Fashion at Central Saint Martins to say a fond farewell…

You might just have heard that we’re leaving our two original sites, Central School of Art’s Lethaby Building and St. Martin’s School of Art’s Charing Cross Road and moving to King’s Cross over the summer. Since 1939 the iconic Charing Cross Road building has seen influential artists and designers leave the school and make their marks the art and design world internationally.

Last Friday, Katie Grand, ex-student and Editor-in-Chief of LOVE Magazine and the School of Fashion toasted the old building and some 800 of its students from the last seventy years with a party. Guest DJs including Corrine of Swing Out Sister and Giles Deacon turned tables throughout the night in five studios and Bistrotheque’s David Waddington and Absolut vodka provided refreshments. There was a chance to cast a moist eye over images of catwalk shows, studios, staff and students across the decades and the illustration room was covered with stylish graffiti as Charing Cross Road stories were swopped.

At 11.00 Pulp played a surprise gig finishing with ‘Common People’ and a rousing singalong. As tears were mopped Jarvis Cocker reminded everyone that the spirit of Central Saint Martins was not in the buildings, but carried by the staff, students and alumni as they set up in their new King’s Cross building.

A night to remember!

There’s a lot going on this summer in King’s Cross. Click on the titles below to view details. You can also subscribe to the monthly email newsletter for more updates.

EARLY SUMMER ISSUE

It’s time for bbqs, flip-flops and eating ice cream in the sun! For some. Others of us celebrate a good summer evening by taking in some art. This week we’ll be investigating some recycled mechanical music machines on Thursday…spacing out at the British Library’s ‘Out of This World’ sci-fi themed late night on Friday… next week popping by exhibition openings next week at Domo Baal and Work Gallery … and then enjoying a good start to July with the long-awaited Cally Festival.

As well as enjoying the arts we try to find new opportunities and ways to connect people, so on Monday 20 June we will hold our first informal meetup for creative types and anyone working in the creative economy. All are welcome and we also hope to find some collaborators for upcoming projects, and get your views on how we can develop the KX. Details are below, but if you can’t make it and are interested in collaborations, just send a quick email to editor@thekx.info with a statement about your interests and we’ll be in touch.

Hope to see you there!

OPPORTUNITIES

BIG VENTURE CHALLENGE

Big Venture Challenge is a national programme to find 25 ambitious entrepreneurs in England who want investment to deliver social impact at scale. A £25K grant and loads of support are among the incentives. Deadline 30 June – find out more here.
(more…)

During the King’s Cross clear-out a mysterious parcel was found in a basement store room. It felt a bit naughty opening someone else’s mail, even though the package was postmarked 1962, but it’s lucky we did because it contained a painting by an artist called William Millar.

Millar taught painting, drawing and mural painting at the Central School between 1948 and 1968. The painting, priced at 96 guineas (about £1,400 in today’s money) had been shown at an exhibition in Belfast and posted back to the artist in London but the parcel remained unopened for almost 50 years.

Find out more: CSM Museums and Collections

Ideas worth spreading

Central Saint Martins MA Communication Design and MA Innovation Management students are proud to be hosting the international speakers event TEDx at the brand new Kings Cross campus in March 2012.

The theme selected for the conference is ‘Emergence’:

‘Our world is no longer easily compartmentalized. Archetypes and predictable stereotypes no longer reflect our world, and these ideals can no longer be used as a shortcut to understanding a global culture and the people in it. Emergence theories suggest that we must study each individual, each detail, each small space in order to understand a topic, group or individual. In short: systems of order that govern and explain our world are becoming outmoded, and a new shift in order is emerging. In reaction to this shift, we would like to host an event that allows experts from different disciplines to engage with Emergence, investigating how spontaneous order, self organization, complex patterns, chaos and their affect on the world society will shape the future of order for decades to come.’

The event will host speakers with varied perspectives from design, political, social and third sector backgrounds, new voices in sociology and anthropology, as well as those involved in new media behaviours, gaming and the often tumultuous private sector.

A limited amount of 100 guests will be able to attend TEDxCentralSaintMartins. Information on how to attend will be released in the near future.

TEDx is a program of local, self- organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized TED event.

Contact information: e.salonen1@csm.arts.ac.uk, a.peplinski2@csm.arts.ac.uk or m.smith44@csm.arts.ac.uk

Visit:
- More on TEDx
- MA Innovation Management course page
- MA Communication Design course page

The Street and part of the Eastern Studio Building viewed from a bridge

On April 4th practical completion was achieved on Central Saint Martins King’s Cross basebuild. Overbury – the fit out contractors – are now on site. Handover to the University starts in July and finishes early August. The above and following two images are by official King’s Cross photographer, John Sturrock.

The figures:

• More than 2.4 million man hours
• 10 acres of gross floor area
• Enough concrete to fill 8 Olympic swimming pools
• More than 150 listed building consent and reserved matter conditions
• Over 1.3 million timber blocks laid to The Street floor in 882 days

The Granary Building viewed from the East West Link

The Performance Centre to the northern end of the development

Visit:
- More about King’s Cross

Central Saint Martins Charing Cross Plaque by David Rhys Jones

To commemorate leaving our sites and for those who wish to buy a memento, we’ve commissioned a range of limited edition gifts paying tribute to our buildings.

The gifts are designed by David Rhys Jones, who trained at Central Saint Martins and has exhibited widely, including The V&A Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Courtauld Institute. He was joint winner of the Jerwood Prize in 2010, and his work is held in many private and public collections, including the Tate.

The leaving gifts include a Sex Pistols plaque, a CSM Charing Cross Road Plaque, and a Lethaby plaque – all £35 a piece.

Also on sale are Central Saint Martin’s Artist’s Books. This set of books by David Rhys Jones are part of a limited edition of fifty sets commissioned by Central Saint Martins in order to record the two main College buildings prior to re-location to a new site in King’s Cross in 2011. The ‘pocket’ of each book contains a folded book structure of photographs of the college and a timeline. One copy is held in the collection of the Tate.

All profits go toward student support projects.

Visit:
- Leaving gifts at the online store

We’re in at number 15 for the announcement of our move to King’s Cross:

“After decades at its iconic Charing Cross Road site, Central Saint Martins announced plans to move to a new super campus in Kings Cross in 2011, where it will unify four of its CSM schools – the School of Fashion and Textiles, the School of Art, the School of Graphic and Industrial Design and the Drama Centre London.”

Read the full list on Vogue.com

Christopher Kane, Donatella Versace and Louise Wilson. Image courtesy of style.com

Donatella Versace has generously donated £20,000 to our recently established appeal.

The announcement was made at the dinner held by Versace to launch the fund. Of her donation, Versace said:

“I am delighted to be able to do something to help the next generation of talent,” says Versace. “I have been lucky enough to have had some incredible assistance over the years from young British designers and graduates of Central Saint Martins in particular – now I can return the gesture.”

Also in attendance at the dinner were Rupert Everett, Christopher Kane, Louise Goldin, Converse’s Cheryl Calegari and Net-a-Porter’s Natalie Massenet and many others.

Read the full story on the Vogue website
Read an account of the dinner with images on style.com
Full details of the 20:20 Fashion Fund and how you can help