The Ceramic Work of Simon Pettet review — a hopscotch through history

★★★★☆Fake, fortune or outright phoney and proud? Simon Pettet was for phoney and proud of it. His blue and white ceramics may be a tribute to the delftware of the Dutch Golden Age, but they are first and foremost a tease. At Dennis Severs’ House on Folgate Street in Spitalfields all is a lark, a game, a hopscotch through history.

Severs was a blond Californian surfer boy when he moved to London in 1967. He knew England only through screen adaptations of Dickens and Fielding. He thought he might study law at Inner Temple, worked instead as a picture-carrier at Christie’s, then started conducting city tours in a top hat from an open landau. After Severs bought a derelict 18 Folgate Street in 1979