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Wine enthusiasts often wax lyrical about how their favourite tipple reflects the terroir. But few consider the regionality of the glass in which it is served. British designer Lulu Harrison is making glassware that foregrounds its provenance, using locally foraged ingredients: the shells of invasive quagga mussels, sand from the Thames, and fish bones from restaurants. Each of her collections bears the subtle notes of its locale; the impurities of the materials create colour variations, bubbles and textures.
The designer only began working with glass in 2021 after a career in fashion. But when she launched her Thames Glass drinkware collection in 2022, it sold out within weeks; she has won a string of bursaries and awards, now including the Design Museum’s just-announced 2025 Ralph Saltzman Prize. Her collections will be on show at the Design Museum from June 24 to August 25, alongside piles of her raw ingredients. “Lulu’s work points to a hopeful future for design,” says Johanna Agerman Ross, Conran Foundation chief curator at the Design Museum, “one that is focused on finding new systems and ways of working that are deeply connected to specific geographies.”
Harrison’s goal is to promote a sustainable approach to glassmaking, an energy-hungry industry in which materials — such as sand and soda ash — are often imported over long distances. But she is looking to the past to reimagine its future. “I’m inspired by primitive glassmaking recipes, particularly the forest glass era in late medieval Europe,” she explains. “People would make glass from local materials, such as ferns and wood ash.”
Harrison grew up in Oxford and started a fashion business in 2017, collaborating with an NGO in India that taught sewing skills and made clothing from discarded bedsheets. But she grew disillusioned with the industry. When Covid struck, it prompted her to focus on working more locally, and she signed up for the innovation-focused Material Futures master’s degree course at Central Saint Martins, seeking a change of direction.
“I wanted my work to relate to water somehow,” says the designer, whose family are all enthusiastic cold-water swimmers. She began experimenting with seashells and discovered that they were a source of limestone, a key ingredient for soda-lime glassmaking. But she wanted to find more local waste streams. A talk by environmental charity Thames21 proved pivotal. “I heard how quagga mussels clog up water pipes and reservoirs, costing organisations like Thames Water millions to remove every year,” she says. “So I got in touch. They told me I could help myself.”
She sent the shells for chemical analysis and began devising recipes with the help of a Murano glass studio and glass archaeologists. The first pieces in her Thames Glass collection — made with the mussel shells, river sand and wood ash — recall ancient wine goblets in shades of brown, ivory and green, their stratified surfaces appearing like layers of sediment on a river bed. She added water tumblers and carafes, made with design agency Here Design, with a rippling pattern and dense bubbles.
Funding from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust enabled Harrison to spend six months with historical glass expert Dr Chloe Duckworth at Newcastle University, creating around 30 new glass recipes using everything from sea purslane to bracken. She cleans, crushes, dries or burns the materials to turn them into a fine powder, puts it into a crucible or furnace pot and fires it. She then collaborates with glassblowers to give the molten material its final shape.
It’s an alchemic process, with a whiff of witchcraft, as Harrison puts it, and one that would have appealed to Ralph Saltzman, founder of materials company Designtex. “I hope he would have liked Lulu Harrison’s originality, left-field thinking, experimentation with working with an everyday material and, mostly, her commitment to sustainability,” says his daughter Lisa, who founded the annual prize in 2021 to honour his legacy.
Harrison’s regional glassware is created in very small batches as she gathers all the material by hand, but she is scaling up production. Inspired by a 400-year-old glass recipe by Florentine alchemist and priest Antonio Neri, she tapped Kent vineyards for wine lees, a source of potassium, which is used to lower the melting point (and carbon emissions) of the glass batch. She whips this up with mussel shells, sand, recycled glass and biomass ash waste to create wine glasses with elaborate swirls along their stems.
When we speak, Harrison has just moved to Falmouth and has begun scouring the coastline for materials. “I’m looking at rock samphire and seaweed, but also the byproducts of local industries, such as the China clay mines,” she says. Those visiting Cornwall’s growing number of vineyards might soon be able to enjoy the terroir in more ways than one.
June 24-August 25, designmuseum.org
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