Manchester Jewellery Week holds its first edition from 10 to 16 September, with more than 20 exhibitions plus talks, open studios, workshops, guided walks and evening events spread across the city.
It is called I Wanna Be Adorned. It was started by two Manchester jewellers, Jo Lavelle and Eve Redmond, after they came back from Munich Jewellery Week and decided their own city could do the same thing. Around 200 British jewellers are expected across the programme.
This is not a luxury jewellery fair. It is contemporary jewellery, artist jewellery, handmade objects, and adornment treated as something to think with.
There is no single ticket, and that is the first thing to understand
The festival runs through independent venues rather than one hall. Nobody sells you a wristband at the door.
Some exhibitions and talks are free. Some free events still need a time slot booked in advance. Workshops and walks carry their own prices, and several of the smaller discussions have already sold out.
So you build the week yourself, before you travel. Registering for one thing gives you access to that thing.
It also spreads well past the centre, into Salford, Sale and Chorlton. Look at the map before you accept two bookings ninety minutes apart.
The Craft and Design Centre is the hub
Manchester Craft and Design Centre, in the Northern Quarter, is where the festival has its centre of gravity: exhibitions, talks, workshops and a trail through the resident studios in the building.
Its headline show, City of Suffragettes, opens on 12 September and runs to 24 December. The Association for Contemporary Jewellery invited makers from Britain and abroad to answer Manchester’s feminist history with wearable objects about equality, protest, resilience and change.
Eve Redmond curated it with Joanne Haywood. Admission is free.
The long run is genuinely useful. If you cannot get to Manchester in that week you can still see the exhibition in November, though the talks, the previews and the studio activity around it all happen in September and then stop.
Access is not the same in every building
The Craft and Design Centre says the raised area holding City of Suffragettes cannot be reached directly by wheelchair or mobility-aid users, though the open layout means the display can be seen from below.
That is a useful warning about the whole festival. There is no single access policy covering the city.
Converted arches, historic workshops, libraries and independent studios all have different doors, different toilets and different stairs. If you have a specific mobility requirement, call the venue before paying for anything.
HOME Arches packs four shows into one weekend
HOME Arches previews on Friday 11 September and then opens to the public in timed slots on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13.
Snippets has members of Precious Collective responding to photographs and material culture from present-day Manchester. THEN + NOW looks back over 27 years of exhibitions by DIALOGUE Collective.
Jo Lavelle’s 30 Rings 30 Years puts archive pieces, commissions and new work together across three decades of making. Parcel Challenge 3 hands artists discarded material, footballs and window blinds and fairy lights and table-tennis balls, and asks for large-scale jewellery back.
Entry works by booked slot. Mark McLeish is talking about his work on the Sunday afternoon, included for anyone holding the right slot.
The city keeps turning up in the material
Manchester is not just the venue here. It keeps appearing inside the work.
City of Suffragettes takes the political history. 24 Carat Party People takes the music. Cotton to Graphene, at Manchester Metropolitan University, puts the material that built the city next to the one its laboratories are known for now.
That local grounding is the reason the festival exists here rather than as a touring selection of nice objects that could land anywhere.
The risk is the obvious one. Cotton, music, industrial waste and political memory can become captions instead of materials. The pieces worth seeking out will be the ones where the reference is doing structural work, not sitting in the title.
The Open Weekender is where you meet the makers
On the Saturday and Sunday, jewellers, designers and studios across the city open their working spaces.
An open studio gives you something a gallery cannot: the bench, the tools, the half-finished things, and someone standing next to them who can tell you how a material is sourced, joined, repaired and worn.
They are also workplaces. Hours vary, and a small studio cannot absorb a coach party that arrives unannounced.
If you are thinking about commissioning, treat the first visit as a conversation about how someone works and how long they take. The transaction can come later, and it usually goes better when it does.
The workshops run from a design to a finished ring
The practical programme covers jewellery design, wax carving, enamelling and full ring-making days.
Manchester School of Jewellery lists a one-day ring workshop at 85 pounds and an introduction to enamelling at 95. Other sessions put you with a goldsmith to develop a CAD design, or to cut a wax model that could later be cast.
Judge these by what you leave holding. Some end with a finished object on your hand. Others end with a design, a model or an afternoon’s understanding, and the wearable piece needs more time and more money after that.
Ask about materials, stones, casting and delivery before you pay. The title of a workshop rarely answers any of it.
The guided walks cost money
Two walks leave from the Craft and Design Centre, currently at 16.96 pounds.
One follows suffragette history and the people carrying it forward now. The other visits a selection of festival exhibitions with a guide.
They are worth it if you do not know the city or its history. They are not access to private collections, and they do not cover every venue.
Contemporary jewellery is a different market
Here jewellery sits inside art, craft and social argument. Value comes from authorship, from material experiment, from labour, from scarcity and from what a piece is saying, and often not from the metal at all.
Something made from recovered plastic, textile or industrial offcut can carry no intrinsic value and still be technically demanding and institutionally significant.
Which is exactly what separates it from Vicenzaoro, where finished precious jewellery, the supply chain and the manufacturing technology are presented to a professional trade audience.
The question that goes down badly at an open studio is why a piece costs more than its materials. The ones that open a conversation are about time, process, edition, provenance, wearability, repair, and where the work is going next.
A weekend that works
- Friday 11: the HOME Arches preview, or a booked walk.
- Saturday 12: start at the Craft and Design Centre for City of Suffragettes, then use the Open Weekender for the studios around it.
- Sunday 13: a HOME Arches slot, a talk or a handling session, then out towards another district.
Staying longer gives you Monday to Wednesday for the artist talks, the university shows and the venues further out, which is where a first edition usually hides its best hour.
Luxury.it perspective
Manchester Jewellery Week belongs in this conversation because it looks at value before jewellery becomes a branded object in a case.
Nothing here is organised around carat weight, celebrity loans or a private salon. Artists, graduates, collectors and working studios are all in the same week, in the same city, on the same programme.
The first edition will have worked if Manchester ends up inside the jewellery rather than printed underneath it.
Related guides
Continue through the Fashion, Watches and Jewellery desk, the professional guide to Vicenzaoro September 2026 and the report on Homo Faber in Venice.
