Britain, says James Fox, was once a place teeming with bodgers, badgers, ballers, bag women, bottom stainers, fat boys, flashers and flirters. That’s not forgetting the riddlers, slaggers and snobs. And before you say anything, these are all occupations that were once ubiquitous but are now vanishingly rare: a bodger makes chair legs; a badger is someone who etches glass; a fat boy is a greaser of axles in haulage systems, while a snob is a journeyman maker of boots and shoes.
According to the main charity that supports traditional skills, 285 crafts are still practised in Britain, of which more than half are endangered. Seventy-two are on the critical list and it is these, and the people who practise them, that James Fox sets out to record. He meets the Nobles, who are the pre-eminent stone-walling family “in Britain, if not the world”. Mostly they stick close to home, in the West Yorkshire village where they have farmed, and walled, for centuries. Building a dry-stone wall requires an extraordinary kind of embodied knowledge, the sort that knows instinctively how to use gravity, friction and exactly the right-shaped rock to build a structure that allows moorland gales to whistle through and remain standing. Done right, a dry-stone wall will last 200 years, compared with a post-and-wire fence which needs replacing after 20.
It would be nice to report that a walling renaissance is underway. Not exactly, says Fox, for the simple reason that it is uneconomical: even with government subsidy, a waller typically gets less than £85 a metre, working in conditions that only allow for a few metres a day. However, there is a lucrative demand from the owners of private landscaped gardens and tourist attractions. The Nobles recently flew to Japan to build a wall in Cotswold stone for a complex in Gifu. Fox urges us not to judge, emphasising that “crafts have always responded to the evolving needs of society”.
This matter-of-fact attitude is shared by many of the people who appear in this book. Some of them downright dislike what Fox dubs “the C-word”. One Devonshire wheelwright explains that “craft” to him suggests a church fayre. “I’m not a craftsman, this isn’t a hobby, and I’m not keeping anything ‘alive’. This here is a trade.” Felicity Irons, a rush merchant and weaver who makes her living on the Great Ouse, barks furiously at Fox when he gauchely asks her on a cold November morning if she finds her job relaxing. “Of course it isn’t. It’s bloody hard work, just like any other job.” Even a woman whom Fox interviews in Hackney Wick making ceramic noodle bowls rejects the “craft” tag, telling him sternly that she is a “multidisciplinary artist and researcher”.
Despite the caveats and the pleas to remain hard-headed, Craftland is a book that shimmers with love for a dwindling world of meticulous, patient labour. Fox becomes positively lyrical when describing the work of Roger W Smith, a master horologist on the Isle of Man who makes watches that are so special that only 20 emerge from his workshop each year. Sheets of gold, steel, brass and beryllium are hauled into the machine room at the back of the building, and months later an intricate piece of engineering emerges, carefully swaddled, from the front. These delicate assemblages of wheels, levers and jewels perform a kind of philosophical magic, converting the invisible forces of the universe into an insistent tick. You won’t get one for under £300,000.
Fox works hard to stiffen his account of Britain’s lost crafts with statistics, places and dates. Despite this, there is a feeling that this genre of impressionistic place-writing is reaching its own expiry date. Over the past 10 years we have been deluged by books recovering the lost heritages of knitting, fishing, letter-pressing, hill farming and much more. While the illustrations in Craftland are lovely, it feels inevitable that they are woodcuts, linocuts and pen-and-ink drawings, all pictorial forms that now border on the overfamiliar. Craftland is both deftly written and well researched, but it feels like the kind of publication that is itself slipping into obsolescence.
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Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades by James Fox is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.