Public Tour: Hands-on with the Materials Library (Afternoon)

This intro­duct­ory tour of our Strat­ford-based Mater­i­als Lib­rary is per­fect for all mater­i­als enthu­si­asts. Join us to poke around our shelves, jingle our jars, rev­el in mater­i­als and talk to us about our eclect­ic collection.

The Mater­i­als Lib­rary is a hand­ling col­lec­tion of some of the most won­drous mater­i­als on earth, gathered from sheds, kit­chens, work­shops, labs and factor­ies around the world.

Alu­mini­um will be a par­tic­u­lar focus for this ses­sion. Explore its reflect­ive prop­er­ties in a short inter­act­ive demo and try your hand at alu­mini­um stamp­ing, tak­ing home a mal­le­able met­al imprint of a genu­ine Mater­i­als Lib­rary object.

Import­ant inform­a­tion about our bal­lot sys­tem for this event:

We are using a ran­dom­ised bal­lot sys­tem for this event. 

Our bal­lot will go live on Monday 28^th Septem­ber at 05:00. To be in with a chance of join­ing us, select as many mas­ter­classes as you are inter­ested in attend­ing and sub­mit your entry before Sunday 11^th Octo­ber at 23:59. Please note: it makes no dif­fer­ence when you sub­mit your entry; enter­ing early does not increase your chances of secur­ing a space. All places will be offered at random.

If suc­cess­ful, you will be emailed a link to book a space on one mas­ter­class from Monday 12^th Octo­ber 2026. Suc­cess­ful applic­ants will have 24 hours to book their slot; how­ever, if you do not book with­in 24 hours, your place will be offered to someone else. Even if you have selec­ted mul­tiple mas­ter­classes on your sub­mis­sion, you will only be able to book one mas­ter­class. This mas­ter­class will be pre-chosen for you at ran­dom from your selection. 

If you are inter­ested in attend­ing our research talk and/​or Mater­i­als Lib­rary tour, this will not affect your chances of gain­ing a slot on a mas­ter­class, and will not count towards your one mas­ter­class booking. 

Once all tick­ets are fully booked by the bal­lot win­ners, we will noti­fy every­one who signed up and offer them the oppor­tun­ity to join our wait­ing list for last-minute dropouts.

This intro­duct­ory, inter­act­ive ses­sion is suit­able for any­one over 10 who would like to know more about the Mater­i­als Lib­rary and dis­cov­er what we have on our shelves; includ­ing silly putty, polar­ising films, mush­room leath­er and glass formed by lightning.

Every­one at UCL is wel­come in our spaces. We strive to make all of our pro­cesses access­ible, includ­ing attend­ing our events and work­shops, and using our web­site and book­ing sys­tems. Please mes­sage us if you have any ques­tions or require­ments, or need assist­ance using our plat­forms. We’ll be happy to help.

We’re always inter­ested in feed­back to help us improve access to our activ­it­ies. Please con­tact events@​instituteofmaking.​org.​uk if you’d like to chat.