Ten Teesside University interior design students have taken their final projects from Middlesbrough to one of London’s best-known design districts, presenting their ideas directly to architects and industry professionals.
EGGER London invited the BA (Hons) Interior Design group to take part in the first Clerkenwell Grad Week. The new exhibition was created to connect graduate talent from different regions with professional networks in the capital and to support the difficult step from university work into employment.
A month in the showroom
The students’ projects remained on display throughout July on EGGER’s life-size digital wall. They also travelled to the showroom to explain the thinking behind their designs and pitch their work to an invited audience.
That presentation element made the opportunity more than an exhibition. Interior designers need to communicate how a space should work, why materials have been chosen and how a concept answers a client’s brief. Speaking to working professionals gave the students a chance to practise those skills while receiving a very different kind of feedback from a university assessment.
The Teesside group was Kate Owen, Betsy Gowland, Sophie Turner, Emily Waters, Olivia Kime, Millie Blackburn, Joe Bell, Liyun Leanne Ma, Mana Sassani and Theo Todd O’Neill.
Building contacts beyond Teesside
Clerkenwell is already home to a major annual design week attended by designers, architects and manufacturers. The graduate event uses that existing concentration of showrooms and professional networks to give emerging designers a visible platform.
Senior lecturer Richard Sober said the invitation grew from relationships between university staff and people working across design, manufacturing and practice. Lecturer Christie McGowan said presenting was daunting, but the students handled the experience well and used it to meet people in the industry.
Students Kate Owen and Betsy Gowland both highlighted the value of making connections and seeing how other creatives work. For a new graduate, those conversations can be as useful as the display itself: a portfolio shows the finished idea, while a confident explanation shows how the designer thinks.
The also gives a national company a closer look at talent being developed in the North East. For the ten students, it meant their work was not packed away when the degree show ended. It spent a month in front of the people they hope to work alongside.
: Student names and exhibition details were checked against Teesside University’s report of 10 August 2026. Image: Teesside University.