Alex Williams and Stockport Fungi

As you enter into the cellar of our restaurant, clambering underneath a shutter to get there, you are confronted with a vast darkness illuminated by a faint light in the distance. Follow it and you will enter an improvised town of sheds, the homemade haven of Alex Williams, our collaborator and founder of StockportFungi. The dark corners of the studio are home to mushrooms of numerous varietals, with a thick humid air necessary for their growth, that adds to the mysticism of this subterranean world.

After a 17 year career as a model maker, Alex turned her hands from crafting puppets for stop motion animation with collaborators such as Wes Anderson to nurturing mycelium who have an innate desire to grow. Alex maintains the environment to allow them to do their best. With mushroom plumes reaching towards the veiled windows that let in the faintest of musky lights. 

Alex will be running a number of workshops late summer early autumn, a three part programme beginning with a mushroom growing class, teaching people how to inoculate mycelium and how to emulate conditions to grow using recycled materials. Mushroom paper making and drawing classes using foraged ink caps and ending in a fungi floristry workshop.

Alex’s workshop is an inspiring place to experience how the capacity for life can flourish once given a little encouragement. We hope to share this with people, to encourage home growing and how creatively we can work with and explore the mushroom world.