Aardman’s Sir Peter Lord was born in Bristol in 1953 and lived here for the first nine years of his life. In 1976, he returned and established his now globally admired animation studio with co-founder Sir David Sproxton. Both were knighted in 2026 by King Charles for their service to film and charity. As Aardman celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, Sir Peter speaks to Sam McEvans about his affection for our city, his happiest moments here and his passion for the next generation of creatives…
A freshly knighted Sir Peter Lord has been kind enough to take a moment from his busy anniversary year to answer our questions, and we’d be remiss not to offer our congratulations before getting started.
“Thank you,” he says humbly. “Yes, it’s all rather amazing. I mean, totally unexpected.”
The cogs inside his imaginative mind turn a little before he continues: “Well, why would you expect it? What sort of weird person would you be if you went through life expecting to be knighted?”
“The oddest thing is that you go to bed one night as an ordinary bloke and then you wake up the next morning to find that you’ve been transformed into a character from a fairy tale or an Arthurian romance.”
I ask our Arthurian knight to take a short trip down memory lane with us. We gallop towards the mid-1980s as he reflects on his favourite chapter from the past half-century.
Formative years in Clifton
Sir Peter names 1986 as a particularly happy year: “We were feeling prosperous, creative and fortunate. I would say that life and business were pretty easy. We had a quickly growing reputation.”
Today, Aardman’s workforce expands to more than 450 people when a feature film is in production, such as the forthcoming Halloween caper Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom.
But back then, 10 years into Aardman’s lifespan as a company, the team consisted of only a dozen employees. “We were a smallish team, working out of a converted furniture repository in Clifton,” Sir Peter recalls. It was around this time that novice filmmaker, Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park, joined the team while finishing off his graduation project, A Grand Day Out, in the Aardman space.
The studio was located at 14 Wetherell Place, a characterful redbrick coach house near Park Place, and was the company’s sixth home in Bristol. It remained in the studio’s property portfolio until 2008, alongside Gas Ferry Road (from 1991) and Aztec West (from 1998) which both remain operational today.
Based in the old Fyffes building and nicknamed the “Banana Warehouse”, Gas Ferry Road was where The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave were filmed in the 1990s. Aztec West, in Almondsbury, was first acquired for Chicken Run and is used for long-form shoots.
A sign of the times in a city so in need of housing, 14 Wetherell Place has now been converted into flats, but in 1986 some of Aardman’s breakout hits were brought to life beneath its vaulted ceilings.
“In a couple of years, we produced films for Channel 4 – including Creature Comforts, various TV ads and Sledgehammer for Peter Gabriel,” Sir Peter says, recounting this memorable sprint of creativity.
When we finished, we discovered the whole set had rotted in the damp. Luckily, we’d completed the film
before we fell through the floor
Cracking creations and Bristolian in-jokes
Sir Peter happily revisits memories from Aardman’s early TV creations, like an advert he filmed for a brand of wood stain.
“Those ads were fun. For their time, they were pretty revolutionary. We were experimenting with replacement mouth shapes and the puppet itself was, well I guess about a metre tall – which is very unusual.”
The wooden Cuprinol man, a lesser-known gem in the Aardman archive, is currently on display at the M Shed’s Aardman retrospective (until September 13, pictured below (credit: Bristol Museums and Rob Browne Photography)). He even still smells of varnish when it is set free from its glass case by the museum curator.
Chuckling, he describes gluing tiny resin “splashes” on the Cuprinol set and spraying it continually with water to create the effect of rain: “When we finished, we discovered that the whole set had rotted in the damp. Luckily, we’d completed the film before we fell through the floor.”
For Sir Peter, a sense of place and time are often intertwined with memories of specific creative outputs. For instance, when thinking of Morph, the cheeky clay character, it conjures up the Stork House studio in Hotwells where The Amazing Adventures of Morph was shot in 1980.
Sir Peter often talks about how the studio is “reflective of Bristol” and how proud he is to be “part of the city”. Another delight of M Shed’s current exhibition is the way it celebrates this symbiotic relationship.
As young filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s, Sir Peter and Sir David found Bristol an ideal place to set up shop. Its affordability, creative energy and thriving community of early-career artistic talent from the universities created the conditions for Aardman to flourish. The city was also home to a growing television production industry, and from the very beginning, the founders provided animation for BBC programmes.
Homage to Aardman’s roots here abounds at the M Shed show, from a Bristol-inspired bus prop and a gigantic set of Temple Meads arches from the Shaun the Sheep movie to a tiny tin of “Fly’s Cocoa” in a rooster hut set from Chicken Run. The latter scenery, with its nod to Fry’s Chocolate, is a particular treasure because many like it were destroyed in the Silverthorne Lane warehouse fire of 2005.
The future of creative talent and “thumbiness”
As the crowds pour into the M Shed, young visitors have the chance to experiment with stop motion animation at a tabletop station in the Aardman gallery. The museum’s senior curator tells me that the installation is intended to recreate the way that Sir Peter and Sir David first began animating at a kitchen table.
Sir Peter is delighted by the installation and says that it sends an important message to the next generation that animation is “exciting, curative, fun – and quite easy!”.
“A lot of people bang on about how slow and painstaking it can be – which is true. It can be, but it doesn’t need to be,” he adds.
He takes joy in meeting future animators and stands grinning in a recent photograph of himself alongside apprentice filmmakers on their first day at Aardman Academy, the school operated within the working studio.
Academy participants have the chance to make real films as part of the programme. More than 2,000 former students now work in the industry worldwide, with their films screened at more than 80 festivals in 2025 alone.
Sir Peter is clearly committed to passing on his hand-made craft and investing in future talent. The academy is just one of the ways you can see Aardman’s fingerprints on Bristol’s creative economy and reputation.
When it comes to innovation, technologies such as CGI and 3D set modelling are used selectively and strategically at Aardman. “We use tons of digital technology throughout our filmmaking, and we find it essential and incredibly helpful,” Sir Peter explains. At the same time, he emphasises that handmade animation remains “happily and proudly” at the heart of everything they do.
“We believe that the intimacy and the humanity of the process is somehow visible onscreen.” This is often referred to by the studio and its fans as Aardman’s signature “thumbiness” – where the prints of the animator can still be seen in the clay characters as they move around.
Home sweet Bristol
Before we close, I ask Sir Peter to share what he loves most about the city he has called his personal and professional home for almost 60 years of his life. “The docks,” he answers. “When I first returned to Bristol in 1976, you could hardly see the docks, let alone enjoy the area. It was all decayed and abandoned wood-yards and warehouses.
“Now you can walk all round and enjoy the views, the food, the history, the activity, the pubs. Love it!”
aardman.com | Cracking Exhibition, Gromit! 50 Years of Aardman in Bristol is at M shed until 13 September
Mini-museum hunt! 50 years of Aardman is at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery until 13 September | Visit bristolmuseums.org.uk for info on both exhibitions
