Frederick Parker Collection Evening celebration

Around 70 people attended an evening celebrating the Frederick Parker Chair Collection and hear about future plans earlier this month.

The reception took place on Wednesday 23 October at the Old Castle Street campus of London Metropolitan University.

The Frederick Parker Collection is a unique and outstanding educational resource spanning over 300 years of British furniture making and design, from 1660 to the present day.

The collection comprises over 200 chairs, together with an archive of related historical documents and artefacts and became part of The Furniture Makers’ Company in 2013.

The evening celebrated the progress that has been made over the past 10 years, which has seen the number of 20th and 21st century chairs grow as well as the collection’s relocation to Old Castle Street as part of the university’s part of the Library and Special Collections.

The Frederick Parker and Parker Knoll Archive has also been professionally catalogued and published online during this time.

Attendees to the event got to see the collection up close, including the fantastic chair wall, as well as some of the many documents including business and financial records, photographs, advertising material, designs, fabric samples, and reference books.

Past Master David Dewing, chairman of the Frederick Parker Collection, spoke about the history of the collection, what the committee has been doing its plans to do to promote the collection as an educational resource to students, which has included chairs going on a tour to two institutions.

Past Master Martin Jourdan, grandson of Frederick Parker and chairman of the Friends of the Frederick Parker Collection, regaled guests with some personal anecdotes about the collection and his time at Parker Knoll, the company founded by Frederick Parker in 1869.

The annual cost to be Friend of the Frederick Parker Collection is £70. In addition to supporting a fantastic cause, friends are automatically entered into an annual Champagne draw with the chance of winning a dozen bottles.