big spoons for English Heritage

I am currently working on an order for replica woodware for an English Heritage project at Dover Great Tower. I have lots of designs for 12th century wooden bowls both for the kitchens and Kings quarters but spoons were a bit more difficult.

Here are the few pics I have managed to find and the first spoons I have been making.






These spoons don't look as big as they are, they are just over 50cm long and hold a bit over 1/4 pint.


I rough them out with the axe then hollow with a small curved adze and refine the form with a straight woodcarving knife and home made long handled hook knife. I particularly liked the decoration on the handle, very quick and easy, a good design unashamedly stolen from a medieval spooncarver.

Time Team are filming a lot of the project so you may seem them sometime next series.

flint knapping

I find it is very helpful to me in my work to occasionally go and spend some time working with another craftsman. To learn new unrelated skills often is very inspirational, I guess I am lucky in that after working in the crafts for many years I know many of the best traditional craftspeople in the country. I used to do shows with Phil Harding of time team and loved to sit and watch him knapping flint, I swapped some of my bowls for a pair of earings for Nicola.


It was something I always fancied trying and I have finally booked myself on a day course. So Daniel Carpenter from the Heritage Crafts Association and myself are booked to go and see John Lord for a days knapping. John worked for English Heritage at Grimes Graves for many years before setting up as a full time napper. He has done a lot of work for flint buildings as well as lots of replicas and demonstrations for museums, he also taught a young Ray Mears how to work flint and make primitive tools.

Here is some of John's work, I don't expect to come home with anything this good looking but it is always interesting to explore a new material.



And here is his website

http://www.flintknapping.co.uk/

and finally an amusing youtube about the effect of bronze on flint knappers.

one for the whisky drinkers

I have just finished this rather fine quaich for a special order from a customer in Sweden.


It may look just like the normal quaich on my website untill you see it alongside the one I use myself. It is a big brother quaich.

Although I have been making quaiches for a couple of years now I only really started to understand them more recently.

The quaich is a special vessel for drinking whisky but what is interesting is that it is a communal drinking vessel designed to be passed around in a sociable manner. This sort of comunal drinking was the norm from Viking times up to the 19th century and is well recorded in Pepys who wrote of sharing a drink from a wooden mazer to Thomas Hardy who often has folk sharing a vessel of ale in the pub. It still continues in various livery companies and Oxbridge colleges at special dinners. I wonder when and why we started to drink from individual vessels, it changes the experience completely, it's impossible to imagine a group of friends sitting smoking individual joints, how antisocial it would seem.

The reason I had never really understood this communal drinking aspect of quaiches was that I have never really been a whisky drinker, until that is we were visited by our German carpenter friends last year. On completion of our timber frame building there is a traditional ceremony involving the drinking of spirits. It seemed right that it should be a British spirit and the time right to try out my quaiches. We had some of the most wonderful evenings with the Germans and then with a wider gathering of woodworking friends in Wales sitting round in a warm cottage in front of a fire passing round a small quaich of whiskey, sharing stories and song. It felt so right, part of such a long tradition and at last I understood the quaich.

save Portland Works

Folks who have been watching my blog for a while may remember me visiting Stuart Mitchell a knifemaker in Sheffield. He works in Portland Works which was built in the 1870s as a cutlery works. It has an incredibly important part in Sheffield if not world history as the place where stainless steel was first manufactured in 1913.


Today the rent from metalwork workshops is not as much as from inner city flats so the owners have applied for planning permission to convert it, evicting the various metalwork businesses. Another of these Wigfall tools are one of the last works in Sheffield forging tools still using the historic forge workshops that were originaly built for the job.

To me this is a prime example of Living Heritage, Sheffield is synonomous with metalworking and cutlery, everyone reading this will have stainless steel cutlery in their home and in many it will have been made in Sheffield. The Victorian Society and English Heritage have taken an interest in the building which is grade II* listed but their interest lies primarily in the the fabric of the building. To my mind the real heritage of this site and the thing that is special is the continuity of use for the pupose the building was designed for and the importance of that trade within the culture of Sheffield. There were many such works in Sheffield and nearly all are now flats.

The MP Richard Caborn has taken up the case and there is a facebook group here http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=722315437#/group.php?gid=78074317552&ref=mf where you can find out more or sign up to register your support support for the folk fighting to save this important bit of Living Heritage.

The UNESCO convention on living heritage says "Any efforts to safeguard traditional craftsmanship must focus not on preserving craft objects—but on creating conditions that will encourage artisans to continue to produce crafts of all kinds"

I suspect that a survey of working crafts people would rate affordable workshop space as very high on their list of "conditions needed to produce crafts". This is particularly so for the metalworking crafts who need "heavy industrial" planning permission and workshops can be very expensive. The value here though of these historic crafts working in this historic building has to be more than the sum of the parts. We could save the building and turn it into flats and have the crafts moved to new industrial units but to me that would still be a significant loss of heritage value.

a finished bench

This morning I had to stay home with a sick son but Geoff braved the foul morning weather, high wind and driving rain to cut the last coping stones and finish off our bench. I went along in the afternoon to take some pictures just as he finished off. We are both really pleased with it.


I see a great many memorial benches dotted around the countryside and so often they are joined benches which were clearly designed for an urban or suburban setting put in place with little or no thought to the local vernacular. It has been a great pleasure to work on this project which I hope suits its environment as well as providing a lovely sheltered spot to sit.


The view today after the rain was simply stunning. A bench built out of local materials by a shepherd come waller who lives 2 miles down the road just feels right somehow.

apprenticeship the book

I have just read a rather enjoyable short book called "Apprenticeship, The Necessity of Learning by Doing" By Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley & Martin Gay Ford.

At £8 for 50 small pages it is not a cheap book but I certainly had my £8 worth from it.


The forward by HRH Price Charles is in itself worth reading, I'll quote some of it here.

"In his Essay on Typography, written in the 1930s, Eric Gill observed that "tho'
industrialism has now won almost complete victory, the handcrafts are not killed and they cannot be quite killed because they meet an inherent, indestructible, permanent need in human nature." In this Gill articulated the essential truth at the heart of the human artistic endeavor, the unique and mysterious need of human beings to satisfy emotional and spiritual urges."

"I have long felt that one of the great tragedies of the latter half of the Twentieth Century has been the loss - and indeed, the denigration - of so many skilled trades in this country."

I have many friends that have gone through traditional apprenticeships both in this country and through the rigorous German apprenticeship and journeyman system. I know many others that are highly skilled craftspeople that have taken different learning routes.

One of the problems with apprenticeship is that it works for larger workshops but not for many crafts skills which tend to be done by single craftspeople. These crafts were historically often passed on in the family but as they decline there is little incentive for a single craftsperson to bring an apprentice in to teach. There have been many reports highlighting the decline in crafts skills particularly in the building trades and many initiatives and much money spent on apprenticeship schemes in the heritage building trades. One of the best a 2008 report called "Heritage is in our Hands, a review of Heritage Trade Training" suggests traditional apprenticeship is not the answer "a new approach is needed to ensure these skills and critical knowledge continue to be available to future generations. It is strongly recomended that a new approach, based on teaching and learning flexibility that recognises the value of different learning pathways, holds the key to success."

This is much in line with my own thinking, my feelings were that the traditional apprenticeship, has or had its place but we now need to find new ways to pass these skills on. I was expecting the Kindersley book to be backward looking and dated but it feels up to date and relevant and makes some very good points. Lida was apprenticed to her future husband David Kindersley who had in turn been apprenticed to Eric Gill, some of the best insights in the book come from the record of those two apprenticeships.

Kindersley had written to Gill enquiring about apprenticeships and been told there were no vacancies. He was determined though and went to visit anyway. Gill interviewed him, changed his mind and told him "I think if you come back in a month I can take you. You see the chap who is coming has been to an art school and I don't think he will last more than a month."

"What was it that passed through Eric Gill's mind in that moment...Evidently he was impressed by this teanager who had a clear idea of what he wanted to do, and had already taken concrete steps toward doing it. This seemed to him much more promising, as a basis for an apprenticeship, than training at art school."

I'll finish with a little quote from the front cover which, if read carefully, really sums it up "In the right environment an experienced person can show almost anyone who really wants to learn how to do a particular job well."

more bench pictures

The bench is taking a little longer than anticipated as we expected to be working with second hand walling stone and with the new quarried stone we are having to cut all the coping stones which takes time. It is coming one very nicely though. Geoff tells me the oft repeated story that whenever a waller pics up a stone he always finds a place for it on the wall and never puts it down is made up by folk that never did any walling. Having said that he has a very good eye for picking up a stone that will fit just nicely.

This was end of day yesterday.

And after a few hours this morning.


Not a bad spot to work. we just need to make the row of coping stones for the back and it will be done.

dry stone wall and oak bench

Today I have been working in a wonderful location again. This is the National Trust Longshaw Estate about 10 miles from home. I lived here 13 years ago but today I was back to fit a special bench. It is the first time I have worked with a dry stone waller mixing walling and green oak to create what I think will be a very apropriate bench for the setting.


The bench is just in front of the visitor centre which serves good food, coffee and cakes, hard work keeps you hungry.


Having set the main uprights in place to support the woodwork Geoff the waller started measuring up for the foundations.

Having finished my work on the wood for now my job was cutting the coping stones, the curved top pieces seen to the left in this picture, and keeping Geoff supplied with stone.


This is about how far we got in the day, we will be back tomorrow to finish off.

Northampton centre of the shoe industry

Last night we rewatched "Kinky Boots" a very entertaining and amusing film based on the true story of how one old established shoe company faced with cheap imports and declining sales diversified into fetish footwear.

One thing I had not really appreciated when I first watched it were the lovely close up shots of the antiquated machinery working thick leather to make gorgeous traditional shoes. It made me want to know more about the Northamptonshire shoe industry so this morning I had a quick google. Here are a couple of interesting quotes;

"For many centuries, Northampton's staple industry was the manufacture of shoes, and records show that the town made 4000 shoes and 600 boots for the army in 1642, and further huge numbers for Oliver Cromwell's army in 1648."

"By 1831 a third of all the men living in Northampton were shoemakers. Prior to the 1850s they were all 'home-workers', making shoes in their cellars or garden sheds. Commercial Shoe Manufacturers were really only warehouses in which finished shoes were received, inspected, packed and dispatched."

The Kinky Boots story is based on the family business WJ Brooks of Earls Barton and 4th generation MD Steve Pateman who took over the declining business in 1993. They made quality mens brogues but like all the Northampton shoe businesses were in dire straights due to competition from cheap imports and the strong pound hitting the export market. By 1998 he had been forced to cut the staff from 80 down to 30 but they were still struggling. That was when they diversified into fetish footwear, it proved successfull for a few years untill that market too became flooded with cheap imports and apparantly WJ Brooks stopped manufacturing in 2000.
20 years ago Earls Barton had 6 thriving shoe factories now there is only 1.

So what is left of shoe making in Northampton? The football team are knicknamed "the cobblers" and it has a world famous museum of footwear. What will be left for the next generation? is the name of a football team and a museum enough to mark 300 years as a world centre of shoe and boot production? I remember visiting Dalarna in Sweden and hearing of a particular regional basket, only made there. Every child whilst in primary school would learn to make one of those baskets as it helped them conect with their history, to know who they were and where they were from. I would love to see children in Northampton making shoes, in Walsall learning about saddles, in Sheffield making a folding pocket knife, in Kent picking and drying hops and apples. I don't want to see large industries subsidiesed when they can no longer compete but this is as much a part as our heritage as the buildings and museums we devote a lot of attention and money to and in many ways more fragile and easily lost.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3646991/Ive-always-liked-to-shock-people.html

Crafts documentary film

This week I have been working with Tim Clements a documentary film maker who is starting work on a project to make a documentary on heritage craftspeople. It was a very interesting process I think for both of us. Tim had interesting ideas about what he wanted but was feeling his way and using me as a guinea pig to establish a format for the film. In many ways film making is a craft in itself so I think we were both very interested in each others work and ideas.

What made it a pleasure to work with him was that he is making this film off his own back out of passion. He started out making documentaries but has drifted into other work, particularly doing camera work on other projects. The documentary format seems to be out of favour certainly with TV at the moment but Tim wants to do it anyway because he likes the format and thinks it is a good way to treat an interesting subject. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with as the project develops. One of the things he wanted to do was to show the finished craft objects in use so on the last evening he set all his lights up and filmed as we had dinner. I hadn't thought to stage what we were eating in order to get lots of wood on the table so it was only the usual wooden plates, no bowls on that day.

Edale this morning

Its very easy not to take advantage of what is outside your door, so many folk in London rarely go to museums, galleries and theatre and to be honest I don't often walk in the hills around our home, I never cease to appreciate and draw inspiration from the scenery around me but I guess I get a lot of exercise in my day job. Nicola who works at a desk walks every morning. This is the view from my bedroom window, it is always changing and it gives me energy every morning.


Last night we visited friends and had a large curry late in the evening and this morning I really needed to get out and walk it off so went up the hill and it was simply beautiful.




Our house is in the middle of the village at centre of the picture and my workshop is out of view at the head of the valley going into the distance behind the hill at the right. The hill to the left is Mam Tor an iron age hill fort.

Coming soon the "Heritage Crafts Association"

It has been a very busy week with lots of work, a mini break camping trip with an old friend to Robin Hood's bay but the highlight was yesterdays meeting in a basement in London where we made major steps forward with out new Heritage Crafts Association.

Our committee has grown to 8 and we had an all day meeting to thrash out our aims and objectives, a business plan, financial planning, website, and we also decided on our organisations name "The Heritage Crafts Association". Here is a very dodgy camera phone image of what may prove to be quite a momentous occasion.


Whenever I talk to folks about what we are doing people are amazed that there is not already an organisation to look after and promote "living heritage". We have English Heritage to look after buildings, Natural England to protect the landscape but no one to champion the living heritage. That is all the aspects of our culture that make us who and what we are today. This includes folk dance and songs, customs like pancake day, bonfire night or Notting Hill Carnival and the area that our new orgnisation is championing Heritage Crafts.

We hope to work with other organisation and government to preserve and promote our heritage crafts ensuring that they are passed on to the next generation. Once they are gone it is incredibly hard to recapture the lost skills so passing skills from one generation to the next has always to be the first priority. We are aware of many heritage skills that are in crisis. English Heritage have done much work to help with skills that are involved in building conservation but whilst they are are very supportive of our group and have offered good help and advice their remit does not extend to all the crafts not conected to buildings. So the last cooper, sievemaker or folding knife maker all fall outside their remit. We have taken on the chalenge of ensuring these skills survive.

We have a tremendous range of skill and experience in our small group and we are confident that we can make a real difference. Watch this space.

And now a few gratuitous holiday snaps.
Bridlington harbour.


One of my favourite places in Whitby, St Mary's Church, parts of the building dating from the 11th Century I liked this rather fine roof and the layers of alterations from 11th through to 19th centuries.

And when in Whitby you can't leave without visiting Fortunes for kippers. Proper hand craft food production the small smoking shed driping with the tar of many years smoking.