The four seasons of 2025 have flashed by! We are excited to bring you the first of this year's quarterly newsletter with four new articles which we really hope you enjoy reading.
Diary Alert: Inaugural “Wayzgoose Celebration” planned for Bell House this year
by Simon Trewin, Print Room & Bindery
Photo credit: Tania Hurt-Newton
Walk down the old steps into the basement of Bell House and you’re met not by silence but by rhythm: the clatter of type, the sticky crackle of ink, the soft thump of paper meeting platen. It’s a sound that once echoed through towns across Britain, when printing presses were as common as corner shops. Today, though, that sound has almost vanished.
That’s why the news that the Bell House Print Room & Bindery, co-founded by Tania Hurt-Newton and I, has received a major grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund feels so significant. The funding will allow us to expand the Bell House Print Room & Bindery and create a new home for endangered crafts such as letterpress, etching and bookbinding, collectively known as the Bell House Heritage Crafts Studio. It will also, crucially, allow us to expand our community reach.
The new funding means we can do far more than keep the lights on. We’ll be able to restore and preserve our presses, train volunteers, create new teaching spaces and host a celebratory Wayzgoose — the traditional printers’ fair. Most importantly, it means we can welcome people who might never otherwise discover this world of type and ink: children, older adults, and anyone facing barriers to creative opportunities.
I’ve seen it time and again. Someone comes in convinced they don’t have a creative bone in their body. Within minutes they’re setting their name in metal type, eyes narrowed in concentration. Then comes that first pull of the press, and suddenly their face lights up - a mixture of disbelief and delight.
'Unlocking creativity' is an overused phrase, but here it’s literal. We’ve seen retired teachers, teenagers and refugees all sitting around the same table, sharing rollers, jokes and cups of tea, producing something together that none of them could have done alone.
That’s what The National Lottery Heritage Fund is really supporting — not just machines and materials, but possibility. Thanks to players everywhere, we can preserve these skills and open them up to anyone who wants to learn.
One of my favourite recent visitors was a man in his seventies who arrived “just to watch.” Half an hour later he was at the press, grinning like a schoolboy. When he pulled his first print he said quietly, “I didn’t know I could still do something new.” That, to me, says everything.
We see this new phase not as preservation but continuation. The presses downstairs aren’t museum pieces; they’re instruments waiting to be played. Thanks to this grant, their song — and the creativity they inspire — will carry on for years to come.
We would love you to come and experience it for yourself when next at Bell House.
Please follow our instagram feed @intheprintroom and message [email protected] if you would like to organise a visit.
Photo credit: Dulwich Society
Did you know? 13 acres of the Bell House Garden were donated to help create Dulwich Park
by Sharon O’Connor, House Historian
Dulwich Park was created in the late 19th century as part of a wider movement to provide green public spaces for London’s rapidly growing population. Sir Francis Peek, a local businessman, philanthropist, and governor of the Dulwich Estate, strongly supported the creation of parks and had been working towards establishing one in Dulwich since 1872.
That year, he offered the Estate a large donation to help create a public park, but his proposal was rejected. Undeterred, Peek continued to negotiate with both the Estate, which owned the land, and the local authority. In 1885 the Estate agreed to sell around 70 acres, taken from local farms and the gardens of large houses along College Road and Dulwich Common, including Bell House.
Thirteen acres were taken from the Bell House garden to help form the park. The garden had been extensive, stretching to where the rivulet and boating lake now lie. However, the Gowan family, who lived at Bell House, still retained three and a half acres for their garden.
Some Dulwich residents opposed the creation of the park, fearing it would 'lessen exclusiveness' and become a 'playground of the poorest classes.' Sir James Douglass, who lived at Stella House, 11 College Road, and was also an Estate Governor, initially supported the scheme but later tried to prevent it from going ahead.
Charles Gowan of Bell House also had concerns. When his lease was amended due to the loss of land to the park, he requested annual contracts in case the park’s presence prompted him to move. The Dulwich Estate was sympathetic and renegotiated his lease on a year-by-year basis for several years.
He must have been reassured however, as the Gowan family remained at Bell House for another decade. Their smaller, though still substantial, garden remained a source of pride. In 1890 and 1891, their gardener, William Farley, won prizes for his begonias, gloxinias, and sweet peas at the Surrey Floricultural Show.
Bell House Garden continues as a source of pride - particularly for the volunteer gardeners who spend time there each week, and for the local residents who can enjoy the Open Garden each month, due to take place on Saturday, 7th March.
We’d like to end with a quote from George, a Bell House garden volunteer:
“We garden because we care about the future - it’s a vote of confidence in the future.”
Yasmin “tapping into her cheffing expertise to throw beautiful, bespoke plates”
by Jim Belben, Pottery Planning Group
Photo credit: Yasmin Hamouda
We are thrilled to welcome a new member to the Bell House Pottery teaching team, Yasmin Hamouda.
Eureka moment
Yasmin has a distinctive story. She started out as a chef in Northern Ireland. She worked in hospitality for many years. She loved her work and was much in demand. She also ran her own supper clubs, offering creative tasting menus.
Then she had what she describes as her Eureka moment. In 2018, she started a pottery evening class and soon realised that
“I loved cooking, but I did not only want to make the food that went on the plate, I wanted to make the plate as well. So food and plate work together to enhance both. A conversation. That started me on the journey I am still travelling.”
Bespoke dinnerware
Yasmin took a pottery diploma in Bangor, NI, then came to London for a full-time ceramics degree at Central St Martins while still working full-time as a chef!
Since graduating she has developed her own unique approach to making. She works with restaurants, learning about their ingredients and their environment and their culture, then designs and makes bespoke dinnerware to enhance their whole restaurant experience.
Calm and peaceful
Yasmin came to Bell House thanks to our contacts at the nearby Kiln Rooms in Peckham – where several of our team have practiced. She teaches at the Kiln Rooms but has also taken on teaching an all-levels Wednesday afternoon throwing course, as well as regular taster sessions for beginners.
“I love the Bell House Pottery. Such a nice area of course, and the studio is so calm and peaceful. Super clean, well managed, it’s easy to teach here. The views into the garden are wonderful, I am so looking forward to the summer when we can enjoy the garden into the late evenings.”
Yasmin finally left cheffing at the end of last year but intends to continue to offer her supper clubs – food and plate in harmony – in the future.
Upcoming courses
You can see more of Yasmin’s work on instagram @yasminhamoudastudio, and you can catch her on her next Throwing on the Wheel taster session on Friday, 6th March 6.30pm or 6-week course from Wednesday, 15th April 3pm.
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.”
Benjamin Franklin
by Madeleine Hay, Dyslexia Committee
Jump. Hop. Punch the air. Lunge. Ballet steps. These probably aren’t the words that first come to mind when you think of dyslexia. Yet, for our Bell House dyslexia specialists, movement and whole-body engagement are central to how we teach. Why? Well, before we even look at the research, we know something simple: people learn best when they are relaxed, engaged and feel a sense of ownership over their learning.
Sitting at a desk using a traditional pen and paper approach may not tick these boxes, particularly in neurodivergent learners. But give the same child a Harry Potter wand to write letters in the sky, invite them to write giant letters on paper and jump on them to spell words, take turns in punching out letters in the air, and you see true learning in action: engagement, an eagerness to participate and, most notably, a child who remembers what they have learnt.
So, what does the research say about why adding movement has such a positive impact on learning? The most common signs of dyslexia include: difficulties with phonological processing (detecting and manipulating sounds in words), working memory, recognising spelling patterns and processing speed. One of the key challenges this creates is linking information — connecting sounds to letters, and letters to the spelling of whole words.
However, when we move the body and engage a range of senses, we simultaneously stimulate several different areas of the brain, encouraging new connections to be made and long-lasting memories to be formed. Consequently, when learning involves seeing, hearing, saying and physically doing, multiple pathways are created to link the same piece of information. The more pathways the brain builds, the easier that learning is to retrieve later. This is neuroplasticity at work — the growth and reorganisation of brain connections that are essential when we learn new skills or absorb new information. Importantly, purposeful movement can also support regulation and attention; a calm, alert brain is far more receptive to new learning than one that feels stressed or fatigued.
If you’re a parent, carer or education professional supporting a learner with reading and spelling, keep an eye on the Bell House updates and social media for the learning through movement sessions we are running in 2026. Every dyslexic individual is exactly that – individual, so there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for how we build movement into learning. The key is to work with a learner to find out how and when they want to move so that they feel in control of their learning. Dopamine, the body’s powerful, ‘feel good’ chemical is then released in the body, meaning we’re setting a child up to succeed in their learning. Get moving with your learner and build a great learning environment!
Join us for our next talk in the Dyslexia Series: Movement Therapy for Retained Primitive Reflexes by Learning DNA.
