Podge Lunch The Oval 2025: A Creative Uprising with Glitter on the Glitch
Discover the extraordinary creative energy of Podge Lunch 2025, the UK’s most inspiring design and digital networking event curated by industry legend Phil Jones, where leading innovators, rising stars, and visionary storytellers gather for exceptional food, open collaboration, groundbreaking ideas, and the kind of fizzing conversations that spark new businesses, ignite imagination, and celebrate the beautifully imperfect spirit of true creativity.
Phil Jones Clare Jones Podge Lunch
If you are one of the many regular readers of International Excellence Magazine, you will already know that Goodwood Revival is one of my happiest annual fixtures: my spiritual tune-up for all things style, speed, and slightly obsessive attention to detail.
But there is one event that trumps even that nostalgic nirvana: Podge Design and Digital. The glorious Podge Lunch. I always get a little emotional about this gathering because, for me, it is part family reunion, part intellectual exchange, and part joyous creative free-for-all. I have been attending for nearly seventeen years and have made real friends here, the kind who greet you with genuine warmth and then immediately tell you about some wild new idea that will change the world before pudding.
Podge attracts the leading lights of the design and digital industries, the men and women who dream up the campaigns that colour our culture and give shape to the ideas we later assume “just happened”. It is also, crucially, filled with rising stars: fresh, unjaded, enthusiastic, and starting to make their mark with the kind of confidence you and I wish we had had at twenty-three. But the alchemy of Podge is not merely clever people in a room; it is something deeper, more human.
And that, of course, leads us to Phil Jones. The reason Podge is extraordinary is Phil. He is possibly the only man I have ever known who deserves the capital-G epithet of Gentleman in the classical sense: kind, measured, thoughtful, and, dare I say, a gentle man. Phil began as a type-setter in an era when type was still a craft. From there he became the quiet powerhouse whom every major advertising agency relied upon when only absolute precision would do. His accolades read like a résumé written by an impressed deity: Digital Hall of Fame inductee in 2012; among The Drum’s top 20 influential people in digital in 2015; voted Creativepool’s Global Choice Creative Influencer of the Year in 2020. Yet none of that explains Podge. What explains Podge is his character.
Phil curates the guest list with an instinct that blends intuition and integrity. Success matters, of course, but so does kindness, originality, honesty, curiosity, and, most essential of all, not being an arsehole. It is a high bar, and thank heavens. Phil genuinely delights in the success of others. He brings new people each year not because it looks good on a diversity chart but because he wants them to thrive. Podge is not a networking event in the usual transactional sense; it is a place where collaboration eclipses competition. A tradition born from Phil’s original, casual lunches with industry friends which gradually grew into a movement. The penny dropped early: sharing ideas breeds far better results than guarding them.
Though make no mistake, his wife Babs (Boss Lady) and daughter Clare (MD) are vital to the Podge magic and equally delightful. Clare, formerly senior marketing at the IoD, was the one who boldly moved Podge from The Arts Club to the IoD when the former became just a touch too posh for Podge’s wonderfully unruly spirit. A former marketing force at digital agency Precedent, she now sits on the membership committee at The Groucho Club, somehow balances life with her two children, Frank (10) and Kimberley (7), and still finds time to volunteer with the police cadets, where she was named Police Cadet Volunteer of the Year. And of course, Babs is the sauce that makes it all work, the quietly brilliant ingredient without which the whole Podge recipe would lose its flavour.
This year’s lunch arrived wrapped in a gloriously creative theme: Podge’s Little Helpers, Podge Glitchmas. The idea was simple and brilliant: in a culture obsessed with perfection, celebrate the glitch, the happy accident, the misfire, the unexpected spark that leads to transformation. On 5 December, 300 of the UK’s finest creative and digital minds converged at The Oval for a festival of imperfection. The promise was good food, even better conversation, and a well-aimed kick at anything too polished. And true to form, Podge didn’t fix the glitch; it threw glitter at it instead. By the end of the afternoon the room felt less like a Christmas party and more like a cheerful creative uprising.
The day unfolded with a sparkling wine reception at 12.30pm, exactly the sort of civilised welcome one needs at this time of year. A luxurious long lunch followed at 1.15pm: Podge has never knowingly undershot the definition of “long”. And we drifted into the late afternoon with drinks, chatter, and a delicious second wind of sustenance from 4.30 to 7.30pm. CTRL ALT EAT indeed. The food was beautifully judged: a starter of parsnip velouté with curried spiced cream and pickled apple; a main of maple-miso-glazed Suffolk chicken with fondant potato and red wine jus, or a comforting chestnut gnocchi with wild mushroom velouté and crisp sage; and to finish, a caramelised orchard tarte tatin with spiced oat crumble and vanilla ice cream. Afterwards, mini mince pies and cheeky “drinkypoos” appeared as if by seasonal magic, and late-night Podge butties lined our stomachs for the journey home. Excellent wines, beers, and non-alcoholic options flowed throughout: fuel for the ideas being born at every table.
Naturally, such an event attracts sponsors who are the towering names of design, digital, branding, and creative transformation. Getty Images championed the power of visuals; HaysMac brought clarity and calm to the creative numbers game; Mallard & Claret represented the craftsmanship of high-end digital builds; and The Drum added their celebrated intelligence on trends and strategies. Craft brought its mastery of creative recruitment; G F Smith its globally renowned paper artistry; Jupiter its spatial visual wizardry; Fourthwall its fan-engagement ingenuity; and Agency Works its agency-scaling expertise. Friday Solved demystified the dark art of sales; Propel connected tech talent with bold brands; Hybrid Legal kept creators legally serene; and Publicis Sapient opened the doors to an AI-first frontier. Making Moves shaped workspaces for the future, Umbraco powered high-end digital experiences, and Apply Digital fused AI and agility into global digital transformation. In any other industry this list would look like the Fortune 500. At Podge, it is simply the people Phil calls friends.
And as if Podge were not enough, the wider Podge universe includes the famously convivial Stodge Podge and the star-studded Sports Podge, whose attendees read like the credits of a national sporting documentary. Chiefs of rugby unions, Olympic champions, broadcasters, leaders of major leagues, tennis world executives, marketing heads, journalists, and presenters from every corner of British sport gather under its banner. When your guest list includes Adam Peaty, Clare Balding, the CEOs of Wimbledon, the RFU and the British & Irish Lions, as well as world champions, major sponsors, and Olympic commissioners, you can confidently say you have assembled the sporting firmament. It is, quite simply, the who’s who of British sport.
What continues to astonish me, year after year, is the calibre of conversations that unfold almost accidentally at Podge. You sit down expecting a pleasant chat about industry gossip, and instead you find yourself plunged into a universe of extraordinary ideas, bold new ventures, and minds fizzing with the sort of originality that jolts your own imagination awake. There is something uniquely liberating about the way people share here: openly, generously, without the slightest hint of guardedness or ego.
It is Phil’s influence, and the culture he has so carefully cultivated, that dissolves the traditional boundaries of competition and turns the entire room into a great, humming creative engine. You leave with your head sparking like a faulty Christmas light, full of concepts you didn’t know you needed and with your faith in ingenuity deliciously restored.
It is this spirit: the openness, the encouragement, the delight in one another’s successes, that makes Podge unlike any other gathering in the creative world. I walk away each year feeling slightly taller, slightly brighter, and immeasurably inspired by the extraordinary people Phil brings together. Their stories, their experiments, their beautifully unpolished breakthroughs all contribute to an atmosphere where possibility feels not only real but inevitable.
I cannot wait for the next one.
And thank you, Phil Jones, for sharing all your amazing friends with such extraordinary generosity and such unwavering passion for people.
All images by Jonathan Cole Photography
