London Design Festival is all around the capital this week promoting everything from T-shirts and teapots to laser light displays in Trafalgar Square. One of the more interesting projects – Tectonic Plates – Where Art and Industry Collide - is the brainchild of The New English, a venture founded by Paul and Judith Bishop with the aim of getting the English bone china industry to “embrace revolution more than evolution”.

People of a certain age probably have memories of a cabinet displaying the family’s best china and seeing the pattern on these plates emerge as they ate their way through a Sunday roast. Doubtless the china was beautifully made but it had an aura of being ever so slightly boring and conventional. Now so many people lead urban lives short of time and space, 60 piece dinner services tend to exist only in the pages of glossy interior magazines.

Tectonic Plates uses the skills and imagination of more than 100 artists and designers to make plates that reinvent/subvert/trash the flowers and birds and gilded swirls that have formed the mainstay of china decoration for so long. Featuring photo transfers, digital imagery and text in a range of fonts and alphabets as well as time-honoured painting and drawing skills a selection of these plates is on display and on sale at interiors shop Lifestyle Bazaar for the duration of the design festival.

Although these plates can be bought as one off works of art I found myself instantly consumed by a very bourgeois desire to possess a set of six that seem to have been inspired by the roles allotted to young women and girls in nursery rhymes and advertisements. Little Bo Peep with a Lily Cole pout and a pair of ram’s horns balanced on her powdered wig has turned her back on a field scattered with sheep corpses and seems determined to head to the city for a life of glamour and intrigue. Her companions include a feathered seductress (see above) and a literary salon hostess a la Vivienne Westwood.

The ultimate feel-good plate for a slice of morning toast features a photographic cityscape watched over by a children’s book sun made of kiwi fruit and watermelon.

Christopher Curtis of Lifestyle Bazaar is an enthusiast for The New English’s “anti-Harrods china department approach” and showed me some cups and saucers produced in the same vein as the plates. A skull emerged from a pattern of leaves and roses and a black, red and white design with a nod towards Russian Constructivism was revealed to be a squadron of fighter planes and flying crucifixes – probably not the crockery to offer  the Pope if he came to tea.

Produced to try and bridge the gap that can often emerge between traditional crafts and changing contemporary tastes Tectonic Plates don’t simply strike a pose, they may just help to ensure that Britain’s future economy consists of more than banks and coffee shops.

Tectonic Plates is at Lifestyle Bazaar, 11A Kingsland Road, London E2 8AA until 26th September

Image © The New English