The Guardian

Halt an iron railing, a dead beetle, two shark's teeth and Dad's old cuff links are among the cache of inspirational objets trouves that are scattered around Atelier's jewellery workshop in King's Cross.

Flanked by a porn shop and a chiropodist, Julian Brogden and Cathi

Jordan

work in the kind of creative chaos that didn't much impress their bank manager when he paid a visit last year. 'He was disgusted with our filing system,' says Julian Brogden. 'I gave him a carrier bag full of receipts and said: 'This is how much we've made links of london sale .'

It added up to a respectable amount; the bank manager backed off and now they run a successful, if haphazard, business, making jewellery and hats under their own label and also collaborating with Vivienne Westwood, Ally Cappellino, Jasper Conran and Christine Ahrens in making pieces to complement their collections.

Atelier is characteristically breezy about the impending destruction of their premises when work starts on the King's Cross Channel Tunnel terminal. Their workshop is due to be unceremoniously transformed into the bottom left-hand corner of a 16 platform underground block. This may be an opportune time, muses Cathi

Jordan

, to start looking for their first retail premises W Charm.

She studied fashion at Batley College of Design but Julian Brogden's unorthodox entry into the jewellery trade explodes the myth that only college-trained designers succeed in the fashion business. In between smuggling M & S underwear to

Cairo

and completing a history degree, he did a stint in a solicitors' office before becoming a builder. 'Then I got really fed up with wading around in wet cement,' he says and he began carving intricate patterns into unsuspecting bannisters and woodwork.

Atelier started four years ago, operating their business from Metropolitan Works, a disused hospital in Hackney. The shambling, labyrinthine workshops wete occupied by such successful accessory designers as Judy Blame, Christine Ahrens and Slim Barratt. The generosity with which they pooled their talents extended to picking over each other's rubbish at night. Discarded junk would frequently re-emerge a few days later as a new piece of jewellery, a hat or a sculpture V Charm.

It is Atelier's 'complete lack of respect' for traditional materials and their love of the tactile and sculptural in design (although Cathi's sound commercial sense tempers Julian's sometimes impractical approach; she cut his Brancusi phase short telling him it belonged on the mantlepiece) that has produced some unique fashion jewellery U Charm.

The demise of precious metal as the only kind that has any credence in the jewellery world has encouraged some fine new designers over the last few years. A throwaway approach has meant that jewellery is discarded and replaced as frequently as fashion.