Dr James Fox: Why it isn't all doom and gloom for Yorkshire's heritage craftspeople

He has now written a book about what he found and will be talking about it at the Ilkley Literature Festival today.

“This book has been many years in the making,” says art historian Fox.

“We are living through an industrial revolution right now with tech and AI, which is changing so much of the way we work and the way we make, and so it seemed a very good opportunity to look back at older ways of working and making.

“Also, crafts have been undervalued and overlooked.

"I wanted to celebrate those people across the country, in particular the regions. In every part of the country, there are extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, and I wanted to make sure I covered most parts of the country – I wanted to paint the picture of the country, not just tell the individual stories.”

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.

Travelling the length of Britain, from the Scilly Isles to the Scottish Highlands, Fox seeks out the country’s last remaining master craftspeople.

Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and coopers, bell-founders and watchmakers, he gives us a glimpse not only of the past but another way of life – one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could shape our future.

“For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, enriching even the most modest things. And in this increasingly digital age, it is perhaps more valuable than ever,” says Fox.

Some people may think of craft as something people do in their spare time, like a hobby, but Fox is quick to point out that the people he highlights are doing serious, challenging, difficult and often brutal work which is highly skilled.

He meets the Nobles (the first chapter in Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades is pretty much dedicated to them and their craft), they are the pre-eminent stonewalling family “in Britain, if not the world”.

Mostly they stick close to home, in the West Yorkshire village of Shepley, 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.

“Yorkshire has more dry stone walls than anywhere else in the country,” says Fox. “But as agriculture has changed, demand for dry stone walling has decreased.”

But, he says, it is far from the gloomy picture you might expect.

Dry stone wallers and the Nobles in particular are seeing new 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.

“Crafts have always responded to the evolving needs of society,” says Fox, whose book is surprisingly upbeat, despite its title.

“Dry stone walling is seeing a real resurgence at the moment. People think it is a dying trade, but it’s not. They are doing different work, but there is a lot of work out there.

"Most of the dry stone wallers I spoke to were busy, and the numbers have been growing. It’s a story of a great British revival, and it is young people who are doing it.”

He also dedicates an entire chapter to the skilled craftsmen of Sheffield.

He highlights the crafts that have been lost but also discovers many that have survived and are thriving. He visits knife-makers J. Adams and Robin Wood and scissor maker Ernest Wright.

The book is full of pen and ink drawings and diagrams of what exactly goes into each craft. “I wanted to chronicle the skills as much as telling the stories,” says Fox.

“A lot of these crafts are endangered, and so I wanted to document things so that in 100 years’ time people can look at these diagrams and see exactly how things were done and what they were called.” One of the diagrams explains the process of putting together a pair of scissors made in Sheffield.

“That diagram took weeks of work going backwards and forwards with the makers to make sure it is accurate, and I am sure in 20 or 30 years’ time that will be a valuable document in its own right, and if that trade is lost, people will be able to use that diagram to work out how it was done.”

“There were lots of crafts that I saw that are deeply imperilled, but the book is really quite optimistic, which surprised me.

"When I started, I was concerned it was going to be a downer of a book, but as I actually went out into the country and tracked down the people doing things, I was so inspired by their dedication and skill.

“Also, everywhere I went, it was clear that people want to be more ethical in their consumption, and they wanted to employ local people and are prepared to pay more for quality – they are looking to buy less and buy better.

"It doesn’t mean all these crafts are in rude health, but they are being practised in extraordinary ways. It’s not about things that have been lost, it is about things that have survived."

James Fox is at Ilkley Literature Festival today, www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk