Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades, James Fox, Bodley Head, 368pp, £25

At one point in his round Britain tour of endangered traditional crafts, James Fox finds himself in a cul-de-sac in Plymouth watching David French weave a fishing pot from whippy stems of willow. He is transfixed as a complicated hemisphere gradually emerges under French’s deft fingers. After four hours the withy pot is complete and Fox, in thrall to the perfection of this three-dimensional wonder of braiding, exclaims: ‘Beautiful, Dave! It’s a work of art!’ After an awkward silence, French responds: ‘Come off it. It’s a bloody crab pot!’

This matter-of-factness is common to all the craftsmen and women that Fox talks to. He – and we – may romanticise their adherence to the old ways, laud the fact that they are keeping centuries-old practices going, praise their determination to face down the modern industrial world, but the makers themselves don’t see it that way. As Greg Rowland, a Devon wheelwright whose family has been in the profession since the 14^th century, growls when patronisingly congratulated by an outsider: ‘I’m not a craftsman, this isn’t a hobby, and I’m not keeping anything “alive”. This here is a trade. I’m running a business.’

That’s as may be, but there is a profound awareness from Fox’s modern practitioners that they are a fragile link with the past. Few of the trades are particularly remunerative, many are physically and mentally demanding, so there is nobility in their perseverance. Whether dry-stone wallers, oak-bark tanners, rush gatherers and weavers, bell casters, scissor makers or inscription cutters, the makers know that they are an extinction event ready to happen. According to the Heritage Crafts organisation, there are 258 traditional crafts still practised in Britain, but more than half are endangered.

Indeed, Fox’s book, although quietly celebratory, is also a lament. In the early 1800s, 7,000 watchmakers lived in Clerkenwell (34 trades go into a single watch); at the turn of the 19^th century, a third of Northampton men were cobblers, three-quarters of Bedfordshire women wove lace, and every other house in Sheffield was a smithy: all have shrunk to next to nothing. Meanwhile, tanneries once represented the second-largest trade in the country (after wool), but there are now only 23 left. As Fox notes: ‘A typical 18^th-century hamlet probably contained more craftspeople than a large town does today.’

So why fight the fight? Why not let innovation, modernity and disposability take their course? Because says Fox (whose own trade is art history): ‘Craft is a way of being in the world.’ He is certain that the professions he describes still have a place in today’s consumer society and quotes Raymond Williams: ‘culture is ordinary’. He reiterates throughout his book how crafts were a vital part in cementing communities and how they could be once again. Each new yard of dry-stone wall, every hand-turned chair spindle or painstakingly built oak Irish whiskey cask looks backwards as well as forward; each is a link in a long line of creation. Because they are the work of human hands rather than computer-controlled mechanisation, they have character and bear something of the personality of their maker. Almost all crafts, Fox notes, use local materials, so their continuance ‘makes economic sense, it makes ecological sense, and it makes emotional sense’.

William Morris knew all this a century and a half ago, and although most of us have never smoked a clay pipe, worn clogs or played real tennis, we would nevertheless feel a twinge of loss should the specialist skills that brought the pipes, footwear and racquets into being die out. Not least because the products made by craftsmen and women are reassuringly real and rewarding to both touch and eye in a way that most mass-produced objects can never match.

Although Fox is an effective – and non-hectoring – proselytiser, the real merit in his book comes in his visits to workshops scattered around the country. He is adept at giving a flavour of not just the people and the places where they work – ramshackle, noisome, cramped, cold – but the role their trade once held in British life. For example, at the foundry of John Taylor and Co in Loughborough, the last bell casters in Britain, he not only walks the reader through the niceties of alloys and casting, mould making and transportation, tuning and sound profiles, but also muses on the omnipresence of bells in Britain.

This is a nation of bells: there are more than 38,000 church bells in Britain and 5,000 change-ringing (the striking sequences of a set of bells) towers in England alone, but just 300 in the rest of the world. In the pre-modern age bells not only produced the loudest sounds most people would ever hear but structured their lives – calling them to prayer, celebrating weddings, warning of fire or attack, notifying the opening of city gates or the imminence of curfew, or, in the case of the Liberty Bell in Pennsylvania – cast in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in East London in 1752 – announcing a new nation. Even today, Fox estimates, 20 million of us hear one of Taylors’ bells every day, ringing from church steeples or town hall clocks.

The bells are objects of great affection as well as lore. In 1881, when the company cast a 16-tonne bell for St Paul’s Cathedral, it needed two steam traction engines to pull it the 153 miles to London. Crowds gathered in every village along the route, cheering ‘Great Paul’ on, and after a journey of 11 days, the bell was hauled up a ramp greased with whale fat, manoeuvred through a hole made in Wren’s dome, before tolling for the first time to the delight of the assembled Londoners.

Fox has similar tales to tell about all his chosen trades, whether it is the part played by the Noble family of dry-stone wallers whose work maintains Britain’s 125,000 miles of walls (enough to circle the equator five times), or Andrew Jarvis, the last full-time coppice-worker in the Chilterns who makes hazel pegs for thatchers, at a paltry 14 pence each, or the scissors made by Ernest Wright Ltd of Sheffield, each pair the result of 70 different processes.

There is too one notable financial success (although the work of all Fox’s men and women constitutes a form of triumph) in the case of the watchmaker Roger Smith. Smith, from Bolton, learned the art of building watches from scratch, mastering almost all the trades necessary, from dial painting to spring making (the equivalent of 224 years’ worth of apprenticeships), and spent fully five years constructing his second watch. In 2023, that timepiece from the 1990s sold in New York for $4.9 million. He now runs a small workshop on the Isle of Man that produces just 20 watches a year, costing from £300,000 – a reflection that each is the product of three to four months’ work: there is a waiting list.

Fox’s book is nevertheless a reminder of the trades that have disappeared – the bodgers (itinerant wood workers) and badgers (glass etchers), snobs (journeymen shoemakers) and yowlers (thatchers’ assistants) – as well as a paean to those that are clinging on. But the nostalgia that runs gently through the book is not for the past but rather for the present, for crafts that have not gone but are simply underloved and overlooked.