Gisela Graham: ‘Part of south London is Christmas all year round’

Gisela Graham has been creating Christmas decorations for more than 40 years, with her bells and baubles to be found on sale around the world and her customers including the likes of superstar Cher.

Yet her firm, Gisela Graham London, had humble beginnings.

“It’s become a cliché now of course, but I did literally begin the business at our kitchen table,” she tells the BBC.

The German-born designer moved to the capital in her 20s and having got married and had two children, she says she became “desperate to do something creative” so in the 1980s began to design decorations to sell at craft fairs

“For me, it was always going to be centred around Christmas as these were the first decorations that I had made as a child growing up in Germany,” she explains.

“My mother and I crafted straw stars together and hung them on the tree year after year, and the sense of family and Christmas being indelibly entwined has remained with me ever since.”