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Hot metal in the city of steel
Metalworkers made Sheffield great and the city puts a new generation in the national spotlight next week. Michael Hickling reports.
Victoria Kershaw likes a joke. How about this: she has created a solid silver chip fork that costs 65.
One local chippie owner is so taken with the idea, he's had two made to give away in a lucky dip to hook more customers.
Victoria, 31, is a designer silversmith and the chip fork shows how you can be intensely serious about what you do without being solemn. She is a rising star in a city seeking to revive its one-time worldwide reputation for metal craftsmanship by fostering sparky up-and-coming talents like hers.
They are now in the middle of an annual festival, Galvanize Sheffield, which this year sees the launch of a new biennial National Metalwork Design Award. It's worth 10,000 and is the most valuable of its sort in the country.
Judged by a panel including the Duke of Devonshire and Corin Mellor of the famous local firm David Mellor Design, it's a showcase for 11 emerging artists across the country who have made it on to the shortlist. Victoria, Sheffield born and bred, will know if she's the winner next week.
Her entry for the awards is a raised silver tea set. It comes with a tray made of concrete. The humour this time is the snug lime green crocheted tea-cosy that looks to be straight out of Wallace and Gromit. This is the work of Linda Maddock, Victoria's mother-in-law.
The daughter-in-law concedes collaboration is not her strong point. "I'm so painful to work for because I'm so fussy. I'm not a knitter and I didn't realise that if I asked for two rows to be taken off the width or the top it meant having to start all over again. When I turned up at my mother-in-law's with a fifth ball of wool in a different colour, I think that was the last straw."
There's some history attached to Victoria's choice of career – her grandad was in the cutlery trade, making knives and forks in a factory. She is very conscious that what she does maintains a strand of continuity in a business that once appeared in meltdown.
The past is all around her. She works in a lovely airy workshop – with a gallery across a courtyard where the public can view her work – that has arisen out of what had seemed the ashes of Sheffield's proud past as makers of products which all the world wanted.
It's one of several similar set-ups in the Butcher Works which were built in 1830 by a company called William and Samuel, edge tool makers. Their rosewood boxes containing planes and chisels were shipped across the Atlantic and helped to build America. They were the second company in Sheffield to make the Bowie knife.
In 1867, a file-cutting machine arrived at the Butcher Works. The 2-3,000 workers who made a living by cutting the file grooves by hand, didn't fancy that. They rioted in this very courtyard and smashed up the machine before moving on to throw bricks through the bedroom window of the boss's home.
By 1920 this was where Frank Turton operated – a man famous for his scissors and the part he played, as a leading light in the Ramblers' Association, in the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District. By the 1980s the modern working world had left the Butcher Works behind and its ancient griminess and desolation made it an ideal location for a film based on a Charles Dickens novel.
Now re-born as part of the city's Cultural Industries Quarter it offers desirable living space and is a few doors down from the former works of Geo Ellis (Silversmiths), now a restaurant, which has received that ultimate seal of fashion, a television make-over by Gordon Ramsay. The Butcher Works's 7m redevelopment created 50 flats in the upper stories. At ground level, workshops clustered round the courtyard and the old works chimney are occupied by a jewellery maker, a violin-bow maker, a craft baker and Victotia. This hive of artisan industry is supported by Freeman College, of which more later.
Inside Victoria's workshop the "Little Mesters" – the one-man businesses working in metal who did so much to create Sheffield's worldwide reputation – are still present in the shape of the tools they once used. "When you set out, people want to help. The widow of one said I could have the tools her late husband had left in their cellar. They are priceless."
Victoria picks up a pack hammer and works with it deftly on a silver disc. Part of the handle is black from the other hands that have wielded it down the years. Generations of experience, trial-and-error, have brought it to this pitch of usefulness. At the business end, crude springs hold fast a copper disc with a steel disc mounted on top. "They cushion the blow as you hammer and give it a natural bounce," says Victoria.
She has two large "bottom stakes" to sit at and work on. One is a sycamore tree stump and the other is a large lump of wood that looks as if it might have formed part of Noah's Ark. Sitting on top of that is another antique, a "raising stake" on which the metal is fashioned.
There are racks of other vintage tools which have been given a new lease of life by this latest female version of the Sheffield one-man band. Not surprisingly, the Little Mesters who are still going sound pretty pleased to have her around.
"If you have a technical problem, you can speak to them. They like you to go and see them." So she might drop by to talk to a caster, spinner, turner, forger, or an old boy who knows the business of raising, or photo-etching, or polishing. It took a remarkable mix of individual skills to turn out Sheffield's top products, although in Victoria's case she has the lot.
To become so versatile required commitment from the beginning. "As a student, I worked from nine in the morning until eight at night. I was really boring." She got a First at Liverpool and later did an MA at the Royal College of Art.
Initially she worked with different materials before settling on the one which once provided a living for her grandad. "With ceramics you can work for ages on the wheel, only for it to go flop, or blow up in the kiln.
"With metal whatever you do has to be precise and it will stay." Her first Sheffield workshop was provided courtesy of Yorkshire ArtSpace funded by Sheffield's Assay Office which offered subsidised rent and mentor support. For her present one, the Craft Council came up with an award of 5,000 for equipment so long as she raised an equivalent amount herself plus 2,000 for maintenance.
"This workshop is everything I dreamed of and more. And now there's a conveyor belt of people coming through.
"We all have our own style. I'm quite interested in the quirky, like the chip fork, it's quite cheeky really.
"I like people who have a sense of humour. The domestic and function is very important to me."
She insists her cake slice is functional, although at 2,900 there might be a powerful inclination to lock it away for viewing and very special occasions. She has made lace patterns on the concrete base of the cake slice. What's the attraction there? "I like a material that can look cheap and raw and make it look soft and delicate."
Prices for one-off commissions for bespoke tableware start from 900. But a chef has endorsed the practicality of these domestic objects. She bought one of Victoria's "tower of tarts" to display her wares as she travelled around the country. Weighing in at the other end of the scale is Victoria's jewellery which looks so light that one puff would blow it away. "People think it's starched fabric, when in fact it's solid silver."
The fascinating location of the workshop complex, with a new organic caf attached, attracts custom. "A chap wandered in off the street and commissioned two pieces." And being skilled at different silversmithing operations keeps Victoria in one place. It's combining the roles of designer and maker with saleswoman which is the dislocating part.
She must travel away to exhibitions ("you have got to keep yourself in the loop") to look and to sell and that means making up lost time on her return. "I worked through the night last week, I didn't go home – that's the hardest part. I got married in the summer but had to cancel the honeymoon in France. I'm going to make our wedding rings – I haven't got round to it yet.
"Sometimes I work seven days a week. That's the thing when you're self-employed, there's no-one to do the work when you are are ill. I can't be ill." On occasions she has roped in her husband, who trained as a mechanical engineer, to help out. She has one other paid role, looking after a student in her workshop one day a week from Freeman College. This gets its name from the business next door, once the home of CW Freeman, one of a handful of hand-forgers left in the world, who have moved to other Sheffield premises. It's one of three colleges around the country run by the Ruskin Mill charitable educational trust for 16 to 25 year-olds with special learning needs, especially those with some sort of autistic disorder. It's been shown that the students' co-ordination and their general outlook is improved by spending time one-to-one with a craftsperson in a busy workshop.
Freeman College has 60 students, some local, others residential from different parts of the country. There's continuity here too with Sheffield's past in that Duncan Edwards, manager of the Butcher Works, is a former silversmith.
"The students have a lot of co-ordination problems, here they learn fine motor skills," he says. "How to direct their hands with a hammer is extended to how to direct coffee into a cup. We have captured people like Victoria who is perfect for what we hope to achieve."
Outside Duncan's office is a framed enlargement of an 18th century print showing how it all began in Sheffield with men in breeches and buckled shoes crafting silverware for the cream of society. The print came from a company called Roberts and Belk, who made silverware for Asprey's, Garrards and Mappin and Webb.
"I started silversmithing in 1982," adds Duncan. "It was a very vibrant industry in the 1980s, producing a lot of high-end silverware for the Middle East. In 1989 Nelson Bunker Hunt and a Saudi Prince tried to corner the world's silver market – they bought one third of it and a third of the silversmiths in Sheffield went out of business. It broke the back of the industry. In the past seven or eight years there's been a resurgence, although it's only one tenth of what it was.
"A lot of the old-fashioned silverware was dripping with designs of grapes and things like that. Now it's a completely different way of looking at things. There are lots of cutting-edge designs, clever ideas, about."
But what about the wittiest, the chip fork? Robert Pearce, the owner of Woodseat's Fisheries in Sheffield, buys the ordinary wooden sort for 3.80 per thousand. But he's been very pleased with his investment in two of Victoria's silver ones.
"She customised them for us and it's been a nice little promotion for us," he says. "We marked two wooden ones as prize winners and put them in a couple of boxes with about 2,000 others in total. Everyone who comes in can have a lucky dip. It's raised quite a chuckle and has brought in more custom – although with our fish and chips at 2.85 we are doing pretty well in general."
At the time of writing, Robert's customers were still fishing.
Victoria Kershaw : 07973 679 062
Take a tour of the studio with Victoria at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/video
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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