Community Cutlery: Meet the couple whose Ilkley knife sharpening business was mentioned in The Sunday Times Best Places to Live

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Mr Heaton said: “Knife sharpening is something that I have done for myself over the years and it’s something that I noticed a big gap for.

“It’s a service that everyone can use but in this day and age people generally don’t. It’s not represented that well. It’s certainly not advertised well.”

Ms Richmond believes that there is a generational gap with younger demographics not aware of traditional knife sharpening services.

She said: “There’s a generation of people that have grown up with sharpeners coming around to their street either on a bike or in a van and everyone brings their knives out and they get sharpened.

“Then there’s a generation that has no idea that you could even get your knife sharpened. They keep buying a new knife every time one gets blunt. These things will outlive us. They’re made of metal and they can last for generations.”

Quite a lot of people also find going to a knife sharpener intimidating and Community Cutlery is looking to get the message out there that knife sharpening is for everyone.

Ms Richmond said: “We want to be offering something different, fun and welcoming. We don’t want people to be intimidated.

“We want to offer a service where people can come in and hold the knives, feel the balance of them. It’s a real personal thing. Having your own knife that you are going to use for decades, you want it to be just right.”

Prior to launching Community Cutlery, Mr Heaton had a gardening business while Ms Richmond worked in the cafe over the road from their shop.

“The knife sharpening business started as a side project,” said Mr Heaton. “Then very quickly it became apparent that it was a service that people wanted.”

The business, which also runs pop-up shops, started taking off just as the pandemic hit, Ms Richmond said.

She added: “We’ve got a little terrace house down the road with an outhouse in the back.

“People would come and drop off their knives in the outhouse, we’d sharpen them and put them back in the outhouse and they’d pick them up from there so there was no contact between us.”

Sustainability is important for the business with Community Cutlery being verified carbon neutral by Carbon Jacked.

Mr Heaton said: “They did a full audit of all of our business activities including the water, gas and electricity we use here. Carbon created in the transportation of goods from around the world. The packaging we buy. We’ve offset all the carbon we create and we’re now a carbon neutral business.”

He added: “We want to be sustainable. We want this business to have as low an impact on the planet as possible.

“We would like, if we could, to get everything from as close to our front door as we can but if we’re a knife shop, we can’t be a knife shop without having representation of Japanese knives, German knives and French knives.

“It’s essential for us to deal with people abroad in order to have a good offering for our customers. There’s obviously carbon created in that transportation. We want to minimise the environmental impact as much as possible.”

Getting a handle on things

The oldest knife Community Cutlery has sharpened was from the 1900s.

It is the handle that is difficult to preserve, Gareth Heaton said. The couple work with a friend’s business called Burnt Orchid to replace knife handles.

Community Cutlery uses Japanese whetstones to sharpen knives. Mr Heaton said: “If you sharpen via mechanical methods, especially, you can remove a lot of metal in one go, which would diminish the life expectancy of your knife but if you use the methods we use – traditional Japanese whetstones – then you remove a bare minimum of metal and you can really make a knife last and last.”