Got your New Year’s Eve plans sorted yet? How about seeing in 2023 ‘Vintage style’ in one of the world’s architectural gems, set dressed to create a multi-venue adventure playground of music, entertainment and dancing with THE best views of London’s iconic NYE fireworks over the River Thames! I and the team at Hemingway Design […]

We are all for localism when it truly serves the best interests of the local community. I recently read that Preston has been named as the UK’s most improved urban area in a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and think-tank Demos and was cheered by the fact that a town I know and love is doing well. […]

We can tend to be utopian but a divided society serves no-one. Britain is divided in a number of ways and if it continues then everybody will suffer. Between Remainers and Leavers, environmentalists and climate change-deniers, misogynists and feminists, the curious and the ignorant and the haves and have-nots, we’re at risk of tearing ourselves […]

Music flows through HemingwayDesign, and here is a blog that documents Wayne’s eclectic tastes. For more, visit Wayne’s mixcloud. We have a special Memory Tape this week from designer Wayne Hemingway who has hand-picked tracks from the year 1983, the year he set up his first clothing factory in Blackburn, Lancashire. The tape was made to […]

Our punk history…say no more. I am lucky to have been a music and fashion obsessed 15 year old when punk broke in 1976. Whilst the early 70s were exciting for a teenager who liked to dance, with Bowie, Roxy, T Rex, Northern Soul and funk spoiling us for choice, punk was something else. This […]

Universal Basic Income and the passing of David Bowie in one blog? You bet. This weekend I was getting myself in a mood about how difficult it seems for young people to start up with the carefree abandon that Gerardine and I had when we set out on our journey at the turn of the […]

Wayne talks about Bowie’s influence on his life and career. If I am asked to name one artist that has influenced my career then it’s never something I have to rack my brains about; there is one that, for me, has always stood head and shoulders above anyone else. I can track my decision back […]

We have been fortunate to work with some creative and cultural icons. Sir Peter Blake is a true gent and good egg, as well as being an artist that will live forever.  I went to the official opening of Coriander Studios new printworks a couple of weeks and ended up eating with Sir Peter Blake. […]

As you would imagine we are interested in and have a passion for the history of fashion. Here we show some historical pics of Wayne and shamelessly big up a book we put out. I am loving the new book; The Bag I’m in: Underground Music and Fashion in Britain 1960-1990 by Sam Knee. It documents […]

No fence sitting here at HemDes. It seems to be that almost every newspaper and every radio commentator is saying that the V&A are wrong for declining to accept and show Margaret Thatcher’s clothing on the grounds that it was not art, craft or of sufficient design quality. The argument for displaying her stuff at […]

A bit of our secondhand and circular economy history re-visited in 2015. It was the turn of the 80s and Gerardine (my girlfriend and future wife) and I were new to London from Lancashire. We were having fun – records, clothes, nightclubs – and we just fell into our business all thanks to a market. […]

The story of the creation of the Festival of Thrift which turns 10 years old in 2022  In 2011 Gerardine and I were introduced to a chap called John Orchard. He was part of a group of investors who had taken on the enormous, 2 million square foot, Paton & Baldwin’s knitting yarn factory in […]

In July 2015 we took a Guinness World Record off Mexico City A year ago I was asked by Culture Liverpool if I was interested in directing a weekend of celebrations to mark the 175th anniversary of the first Transatlantic passenger crossing from Europe to Halifax, Boston and New York. On 4th July 1840 a small […]

But so much more yet to come… After 4 years of working on the Dreamland Margate project, after so many false starts and times when we thought that some of the enormous obstacles that presented themselves could in fact be insurmountable, the first phase of this amazing community instigated project is open. The June 2015 […]