THE birthday of pioneering Victorian designer Christopher Dresser is to be celebrated in style with a festival in his honour at Dorman Museum.
The Dresserfest family fun day will include crafts, face painting and a brass band, as well as a birthday cake and Victorian-themed games.
The celebration will have an owl theme, in homage to the Dresser-designed plate which inspired the Alan Garner fantasy novel ‘The Owl Service’; an example of the plate is held in the museum’s Dresser gallery.
In keeping with the theme, there will be a special reading from The Owl Service by BBC Tees DJ Bob Fischer, as well as owl-themed crafts.
Visitors will also be able to get up close and personal with owls and their avian relatives thanks to North Yorkshire Moors Birds of Prey.
Mr Fischer, who is an Alan Garner fan, said: “The Owl Service is an extraordinary, powerful book that I first read at the age of 11, and it made a profound and lifelong impression on me.
“I’m honoured and thrilled it to be reading it to a Teesside audience, especially in the presence of the beautiful Dresser porcelain that inspired it.
“This will be a uniquely haunting and evocative event, and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
The day will include plenty of fun for the whole family with vintage hair styling and a mysterious Victorian fortune teller, as well as retro sweets for sale.
There will also be an opportunity to view an exhibition of brand new artworks created by local artists in response to the museum’s Dresser collection.
Dressers Tea Room will be offering delicious food and cakes, and the museum shop will be selling its full collection of exclusive Christopher Dresser-themed merchandise, as well as copies of Garner’s The Owl Service.
Gill Moore, Curator at Dorman Museum, said: “To discover that a pattern designed by Christopher Dresser in the 1880s inspired one of Alan Garner’s most famous books is amazing.
“We have an ‘Owl Service’ plate in the museum and I can understand his fascination; initially it appears to have a floral design around the edges, but as you look closer it transforms into an owl.
“It has captured our imaginations and we’ve themed the family fun day around it. Apart from Bob’s reading we also have live owl displays, owl crafts and owl merchandise. It’s going to be a hoot!”
Christopher Dresser was born in Glasgow on July 4, 1834, though his family originated from North Yorkshire. After working and travelling across the globe he opened Linthorpe Art Pottery in Middlesbrough in 1879.
Dresserfest runs from Thursday, July 2 to Saturday, July 4 with the family fun day at Dorman Museum from 10am-4pm on the Saturday.
The festival is a collaboration between Dorman Museum, Teesside University, and the Christopher Dresser Society, and marks both Dresser’s birth date and the one year anniversary of the museum’s Dresser gallery opening.