Floristry at Somerset House to celebrate Future Plate & the UK’s best black chefs
There are some clients you work with once and you’re both happy and you move on. And then there are clients like The Future Plate, where each event feels like a continuation of a conversation you’ve been having for years — because you have.
Their four-year celebration dinner on the 22nd of December 2025 was one of my favourite jobs of the year. Not because it was the most elaborate. In fact, quite the opposite.
About The Future Plate
The Future Plate was founded in 2021 by Julian George as the UK’s largest collective of African and Caribbean chefs — a project built at the intersection of cuisine and culture, with the express purpose of addressing the lack of infrastructure and visibility for Black chefs in British hospitality. Over four years they’ve catered events for the likes of Meta, S’ABLE LABS and the YouTube Legacy Gala; their chefs have cooked for everyone from Idris Elba to Naomi Osaka.
The December dinner celebrated both the four-year milestone and something they’d been working towards since the beginning: a permanent home. The Future Plate Test Kitchen at Somerset House — a 1,059 sq ft kitchen and events space designed in collaboration with Conran & Partners, set within one of London’s most iconic cultural buildings — was the venue for the first time. No more temporary spaces. A real table, in a real room, that belonged to them.
The flowers
For an occasion like this, the temptation might be to do a lot. A big mixed palette, something that announces itself. But I’ve worked with Julian long enough to know that The Future Plate’s aesthetic is precise and considered — and for a dinner that was about marking a journey rather than showing off, I wanted the flowers to hold that same quality.
I chose paperwhites. One variety, full stop. They were perfectly in season in late December, which matters to me — I try to work with what’s genuinely available rather than forcing flowers that shouldn’t be there. Paperwhites have a star-shaped bloom that, when massed in quantity, creates real impact without visual noise. And their scent is remarkable — clean and sweet and unmistakably present. In a room that size, by the time the first guests arrived, the narcissus were doing as much work as anything on the plate.
I varied the arrangements in height and depth so the table had movement and rhythm rather than a flat line of identical vases. The Conran lamps — a detail already baked into the room’s design — provided the ambient light, and the white blooms reflected beautifully off them. The overall effect was simple, seasonal and quietly celebratory. Which felt exactly right.
Why this one stays with me
The Future Plate exists to do something the industry has historically failed to do: give Black chefs the space, the platform and the infrastructure to build sustainable careers. That mission matters to me personally. Floral Evolution is also a Black-led business, and one of the things I care most about is working with organisations that share a genuine commitment to representation rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Working with Julian and his team over the years has never felt transactional. It feels like being part of something. The December dinner was the night that something came fully into being — a space of their own, in one of London’s great cultural institutions, full of food and flowers and four years’ worth of hard work. I was glad to be part of it.
Photography: Kadir Gold
Planning an event? I’d love to hear about your day.
