Jonathan Thomas (00:12)
Welcome back to the Anglotopia podcast. The podcast are people who love British travel, history and culture. I'm your host, Jonathan Thomas. And today we're exploring the remarkable world of Britain's disappearing crafts. My guest today is James Fox, ⁓ art historian, broadcaster, and now author of Craftland in search of lost arts and disappearing trades. James is well known for his BBC documentaries and his previous book.

books, the world according to color and British art and the First World War in craft land. He travels the length and breadth of the British Isles from the silly Isles to the Scottish Highlands in search of the craftspeople, keeping ancient skills alive. The wallers, the Thatchers, the weavers, the wheelwrights and watchmakers who still shape the world and Britain by hand. We're going to talk about the inspiration behind craft land, the journeys and people that shaped it and what these endangered trains reveal about Britain's identity and why the art of making

still matters in our digital age. Welcome, James.

James (01:10)
Thank you for having me, Jonathan.

Jonathan Thomas (01:12)
Thank you for making the time for us. We really appreciate it. ⁓ We'll start at the beginning. Craftland opens with a beautifully cinematic scene in a long abandoned blacksmith workshop. What was the moment or idea that this first inspired this journey into Britain's disappearing crafts?

James (01:31)
Well actually I think the first moment that I suppose inspired this book came probably about 10 years ago. Now what we do in Britain, every two years we publish an audit on Britain's traditional crafts where we look at the crafts that are doing well, the crafts are not doing so well, the ones that are endangered and the ones that are going extinct. And I remember, I think it must have been about 10 years ago, I read in the newspaper that

the art of cricket ball making had gone extinct. And I thought this was completely outrageous for a country that invented the game of cricket, which I'm sure you know, Jonathan, is the greatest sport in the world, that we weren't even making cricket balls anymore. And so I was really disappointed by this. And I started following this list.

every two years when it was published and notice more and more crafts becoming endangered and going extinct. And in fact, the most recent list came about only six months ago and revealed that of all of our traditional crafts, about half of them are endangered, about quarter of them are critically endangered. And in the last 10 years or so, five crafts have gone extinct in Britain. So I thought this is the moment to travel around the country and to

document these crafts before they disappear. And so I suppose that is ultimately what prompted my writing of this book.

Jonathan Thomas (02:58)
That sounds like a job I'd want to do, traveling around Britain and watching people make stuff. That sounds like a lot of fun.

James (03:01)
you

It was

just the most enjoyable and wonderful thing to do. It was the highlight of my professional career.

Jonathan Thomas (03:11)
Hard to call it work, right?

So you've written before about art and about color. How did this project grow out of or differ from your previous work as an art historian and broadcaster?

James (03:25)
Well, as you say, Jonathan, I'm an art historian. I've always been an art historian. I teach art history at the University of Cambridge. And one of the things that art historians have done in the past, not so much now, thankfully, is they create these very strict distinctions between art and craft, nearly always to the benefit of art. So art, you know, the painters and the sculptors were treated as geniuses and they're

pictures fetched enormous sums of money and they were shown in these great galleries, whereas craftspeople who were typically more likely to be women and working-class people, they were sort of written out of the story. It was degraded as manual labour. And of course these distinctions are completely false. You know, there is for me one great spectrum of making that exists for human beings. And so one of the purposes of this book was to write about craftspeople, to write about

stonemasons and basket weavers and potters in the same way as an art historian might write about a great painter and sculptor because you for me these crafts people though many of them work in obscurity many of them struggle to make ends meet they are just as culturally important as our famous artists and actors and composers that have generally got much more credit

Jonathan Thomas (04:45)
That's interesting. I never really thought of it that way. There's not much of a difference other than semantics between somebody who sculpts a statue or sculpts a cricket ball.

James (04:56)
Well,

exactly. That's my view is that, you know, some people make paintings, some people make baskets, some people make cricket balls, some people make sculptures. But for a long time, the standard view in the West was that those were completely different enterprises, that the makers of paintings and sculptures were kind of intellectual geniuses and the people who made baskets and pots were basically labourers. And we are now increasingly beginning to realise that.

is just not true. There can be skill, can be ingenuity, there can be cultural importance in every aspect of making.

Jonathan Thomas (05:35)
interesting. I can see why you wanted to write a book about this. So the book is subtitled In Search of Lost Arts and Disappearing Trades. How did you decide which crafts to include given that there are hundreds to choose from?

James (05:38)
Yes.

It was a difficult choice. think ultimately I wanted to get as much diversity into the book as I could. So I wanted geographical diversity. So I wanted to make sure there were crafts from all over the British Isles. So as you say in your introduction, we have some from the very south west of England, the Isles of Silly and Cornwall. We have them up in the Scottish Highlands.

I go to the Northern Ireland, I go to Wales, go to across through the Midlands and the North of England down to the South East, I go to rural areas and urban areas. So it's very important to capture the full geographical scope of the UK. It was also important to get a diversity of different kinds of craft. So we have, for instance, watchmakers and stonemasons and basket weavers and potters and scribes. So you want to get a bit of everything there. And I also wanted diversity of

characters. So I wanted men and women, wanted young and old, I wanted people of different ethnicities in order to capture the fact that craft is a very protean thing. Craft can be lots of different things all at once. So it was a difficult choice and there were many crafts I would have loved to include that I couldn't include. There were some that I wrote about and cut out because the book was getting too long. I could certainly write three or four more books.

just dealing with the other crafts I haven't mentioned. Maybe I will do, we'll see.

Jonathan Thomas (07:13)
Well you heard it folks, buy the book and then ⁓ if it sells really really really well they'll make them write another one about all the ones they had to cut.

James (07:21)
Yeah,

it'll be like the Harry Potter books, won't it? Keep going.

Jonathan Thomas (07:23)
Just keep going, right?

Make them progressively longer, right? So what surprised you most during your travels? Either a craft you never heard of or a person who completely changed your understanding of the subject.

James (07:27)
You

That's a good question, Jonathan. I think the craft that perhaps surprised me and awed me the most was the craft of bell-founding. I'd never really thought about bell-founding before. Bells are such an important part of the British experience. If you travel around the UK, you hear bells everywhere. ⁓ Every little community, every village, every institution, the bells are constantly ringing. And of course, we used to have bell foundries.

all over the country because bells were very heavy and roads were very bad. Bells were typically made close to the church or the building they were going to go into. And that's why there's so many pubs in Britain called the Bell, for instance, because probably a bell was made on that site at some point in history. But there's now just one bell foundry left in England. It's in Loughborough in the East Midlands, in the middle of England, right in the centre of England. And the art of bell foundry is just truly amazing.

Because every bell needs to be made from scratch. They start by making a mould. The mould itself can take several weeks if not months to make. And they make it out of manure and goat's hair and soil. And then they have to heat the bronze up to about a thousand degrees and then they have to pour the metal into this mould that they have in the ground underneath the foundry. And then they need to wait several weeks for the bell metal to cool.

And then what I didn't realise is that all bells need to be tuned. And actually there's only one guy in the whole of the UK who knows how to actually tune a bell. And that involves cutting away tiny little parts of the metal from the inside of the bell in order to get it into harmony. So this was a craft that, you know, is all around us. It's very much part of everyday experience listening to bells. I did not realise that it was an extremely exacting craft. And the other thing about bell fanning

Jonathan Thomas (09:14)
How?

James (09:34)
is it's a very, you need to have enormous amounts of patience if you want to be a bell founder. So there was ⁓ one set of bells I talk about in the book. It took 43 years for these bells to be commissioned, cast and installed. That was the length of the project, 43 years. So basically a whole person's career more than that, just to make a single set of bells.

I suppose that the lead times, the patience, the intensity, the danger of the work, ⁓ and the fact that the products of Bell Founding are largely invisible to us, but everywhere around us, ⁓ was really thrilling to write about.

Jonathan Thomas (10:18)
I really want to talk about bells because you're right. Like when that's one of the, you know, one of the things I like to wax philosophical on my own writing and what we cover in Anglotopia about the little things that travelers might not notice. And one of the things I do love about being out in the countryside is you hear church bells and regularly. And here in the U S you rarely, rarely ever hear church bells, despite the fact that we probably have more churches per capita.

James (10:19)
Hahaha

Hmm.

Mm.

Jonathan Thomas (10:48)
than the UK does, they never ring bells here. ⁓ But in the English countryside, they're kind of part of the background. And one of my most favorite memories is ⁓ on Christmas Day, hearing the peal of the bells on Christmas. Like it just went on and on. I was like, this is amazing.

James (10:48)
Yeah. Yes.

I know what you look you say part of the background but of course in the past they were the foreground before people had mobile phones and before people had watches and before people had news alerts and media and social media the bells governed everything

Bell would tell people the time, would tell them when to work, would tell them if some event was happening, it would tell them if a crime had occurred in the town, if a fire had erupted in someone's building, if an army was approaching, it would tell people when they could start opening their stalls, when the carriages had to stop. mean, Bells did absolutely everything. And it was only with the development of people wearing watches and newspapers and literacy that Bells, as you say, did recede to the background.

But Britain has always been a bell-obsessed nation. whenever there's a major event, whether it's the Olympics or whether it's the coronation of a monarch or some kind of anniversary, everyone around the country pulls their bells. And it's a wonderful part of our heritage.

Jonathan Thomas (12:05)
Yeah. I, one of my fondest memories is, and I know you're a Cambridge teacher, but I did a summer course at Oxford and we stayed at Christchurch ⁓ and old Tom every night at nine o'clock would toll 101 times. It was, was great. You could hear it everywhere.

James (12:16)
lovely.

Yeah, I mean,

even as a young student myself in Cambridge, the other place as we call it in the UK, you know, when the pubs closed in the evening, when that was last order, someone would come around and ring a bell. mean, know, bells still absolutely a very important part of the UK's heritage. And if you think what is perhaps the most famous monument in the UK, it's a bell, it's Big Ben. And it's a bell that very few people have ever seen, but every single British person

Jonathan Thomas (12:28)
Ha ha ha.

So, yeah.

James (12:51)
knows that particular accent, that particular voice, of that particular bell.

Jonathan Thomas (12:56)
Well, and even around the world, know the song of Big Ben and it's you buy a cheap clock in an antique store here and it has the same chime. It's so recognizable worldwide. And sorry for getting off topic, but I now want to keep talking about bells. Then surely you must be as devastated as I am that the White Chapel bell foundry closed. ⁓ Like it was almost criminal the way that happened that we

James (13:06)
Yeah.

you

Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (13:26)
We lost that because not only did they make some of Britain's most famous bells, including Big Ben, ⁓ they made the Liberty Bell and like some famous American bells. And it's just a shame that all that knowledge was lost.

James (13:34)
They did.

It's true and it was until it closed 10, 15 years ago, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry was the longest running manufacturing business in the UK. It was going continuously for about 500 years on that site. And what happened ultimately was it was the forces of progress, I suppose. It's in a very valuable, the real estate in that part of London is very valuable. The business

was not surviving. One of the reasons why it's kind of a real irony actually, Jonathan, one of the reasons why bell foundries don't really survive is partly in the UK, we're not building churches in any longer. In the US you are obviously because it's a larger religious population. We're not building churches and also bells last too long. But if you make a good bell that will last you 500 years. ⁓ It's not like planned obsolescence as you get with a mobile phone. And so

There wasn't much business and ultimately the land was sold to develop into a hotel and nothing has been done in 10-15 years so the building has just sat empty.

Jonathan Thomas (14:45)
Well, yeah, and I'm assuming all the equipment and everything is just still sitting there. And it's like there have been earnest movements to try and get reopen the foundry, but now it's been so long and the cost would be so high. I doubt it would ever happen. It's a shame. Anyway, let's stop lamenting. Let's stop talking about bells. Let's move on now.

James (14:49)
Still there.

adapt. Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (15:09)
Early in the book, you call Britain a craft land. What do you think that phrase tells us about Britain's national identity, kind of past and present?

James (15:19)
Well, I think, you know, before ⁓ we became a service based economy, as we are now, and before even in the Industrial Revolution, which we invented, Britain was a craft land. Every city, every town, even the tiniest little village was a community of crafts people with its own blacksmiths and wheelwrights, its own thatchers and bootmakers. So there was craft absolutely everywhere. And

that obviously has faded away and one of the things that's extraordinary is that if you've gone back in time a few hundred years ago there was so much handiness everywhere you know in a tiny village would have more crafts people than maybe a small city does today because they were doing their own local things and so I feel that that's a great transformation that has taken place really over the last few hundred years.

But I still think, and I reach the end of the book by saying, I think Britain is still a craft land. It's different, of course, you where previously craft was absolutely central to local economies and society and without it the whole country, the whole area would have fallen to pieces. It's obviously not that anymore. But the journey I've made for this book shows that there are still a great number of extraordinary craftspeople still operating in the UK and that we are actually

engrossed in something of a craft revival at the moment. Certainly since Covid-19 more and more people are taking up crafts and people are more more interested in the craft. So I think we were a craft land in every sense of the word a few hundred years ago but I think we are still a craft land in certain senses of the word now.

Jonathan Thomas (17:02)
Yeah, when you talk about how different locations had a specific craft, I'm reminded my favorite place in England is a town called Shaftesbury in Dorset. ⁓ Yeah, famous for Gold Hill. And when you go into the Gold Hill Museum, you're kind of surprised to learn that Shaftesbury, other than now it's famous because of a bread advertisement, but you know, a hundred years ago, everybody would have known about it because of the button industry, the cottage button industry that

James (17:12)
lovely.

you

Jonathan Thomas (17:30)
And you look at these buttons, you're like, they're beautiful objects. And you wonder, you know, how did that, how did, why is this one place so famous for buttons and why, why did that go away?

James (17:41)
Well yeah,

mean every area, you know, even only a hundred years ago.

Every area in the UK, as would be the case in the States and many other parts of the world, every area had its own particular manufacturing expertise. for instance, Sheffield was famous for its steel. Stoke-on-Trent, famous for its pottery. Burton-on-Trent for beer. Kidderminster for carpets. Worcester for gloves. High Wycombe for chairs. Luton for hats. Even, in fact, as you travel through London, the different neighbourhoods

different specialities so Hatton Garden famous for jewellery, Clark and Well the watchmaking capital of the world, Bermondsey had its tanners, Southwark had its breweries, every area, Savile Row its tailors as is still the case even now, Shoreditch was famous for its furniture, every part of the country had its own particular regional expertise and much of that is lost there's still a little bit going there's still a little bit that survives but those great regional industries manufacturing and

industries have mostly disappeared and it's very sad because they weren't just important to the local economies, they were a crucial part of civic identity and civic pride.

Jonathan Thomas (18:58)
So let me ask you a question then and forget you won't be scored on this if you can't answer it. I live in Northwest Indiana. Do you know anything about Northwest Indiana or what it's famous for?

James (19:13)
⁓ well, Indiana, I don't know what would it be in Northwestern? Tell me.

Jonathan Thomas (19:14)
other than Lake Michigan.

It's steelmaking. we, we, we, we, with like Ohio and Pennsylvania, we're the center of the steel industry and the steel industry is still big here. I mean, it's changed substantially even from when I was a kid. But when you mentioned these crafts and you mentioned Sheffield and steelmaking, I'm reminded that Britain is on the verge of losing steelmaking. And as somebody who's from a steelmaking area, I'm like, don't turn off those blast furnaces. Once they're

James (19:23)
Right.

Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (19:48)
Once they're gone, they're gone forever and you don't want to lose that, that, that, that knowledge.

James (19:54)
I know it's it's unfortunately it's international competition. know, it's it's an extraordinary. Ultimately, this is a very optimistic book and it's a book that is designed to make people happy. But there's also something that underlies the book, which is quite depressing, which is essentially Britain's decline as a manufacturing power. I've got a remarkable fact in this book that back in the 1880s, so not that long ago, Jonathan, 140 years ago,

⁓ Britain produced 43 % of the world's manufactured exports. That was just Britain. Tiny little place was producing almost half of the whole world's manufactured exports. Now, to put that into context, China today only produces 30%. Now, that's a lot, but that's less than Britain was at its peak. And of course, manufacturing is only a tiny part even of just a Britain's economy.

So that is ultimately what lies behind this book, is this pivot that Britain has made in many ways against its will, away from being a manufacturing powerhouse, the workshop of the world, towards being essentially a service-based economy.

Jonathan Thomas (21:08)
And it's, and we're right behind you in that trend here in the U S you know, that sometimes it seems like even here, the steel industry is holding on by the skin of its teeth. mean, just U S steel was just bought by the Japanese, which was, a big deal that that happened. It was like, well, why do we need the Japanese to prop up our, our biggest steel company? You know, and the only tool could change it administration to actually make it happen, but we don't want to get political. ⁓

James (21:11)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (21:36)
So you write movingly about names like Smith, Wright, and Taylor as echoes of craft heritage. What do you think we lose culturally and personally when those identities fade?

James (21:49)
Well, you're right. mean, I've got a passage in the book about surnames. You know, if your name is Smith or Wright or Mason or Taylor or Cooper or Chandler or Dexter or Challener or Sawyer or Glover or Kellogg for that matter, then you likely to send from a craftsman. Do you know what a Kellogg used to do, Jonathan?

Jonathan Thomas (22:08)
Well, I know

about the cereal, but I have a feeling it's different.

James (22:11)
Well,

Kelloggs were pork butchers and it comes from the phrase kill hog. So that's where the word Kellog comes from, the name Kellog comes from. So obviously, you know, those names reveal how absolutely profound a part of our identity craft actually is. Because let's be honest, all of us ultimately descend from craftspeople.

We may not have in the last two or three generations, although many of us have, but ultimately, all of us at some point, our ancestors were making things by hand because it was the only way to make things by hand. And we have been doing this since...

humanity first arrived on this planet. The first things we did, the things that marked us out as different from other species, was that ability to use our hands and our thumbs, our opposable thumbs, to build things, to make things, create tools, to manipulate our environment. craft is not just part of who we are as individuals or as families, it is part of who we are as a species. We are a species of makers. And we have lost that to some extent, that sense.

over the last 10, 20, 30 years as we have become disconnected from the act of making things because machines do it for us. But I still think the urge is within us, the emotional bond to that is within us.

Jonathan Thomas (23:32)
You just made a light bulb kind of go off of my head. On my father's side, the surname is Taylor and they're from Durham. So I suspect I can probably put two and two together what they did before they immigrated to the U.S.

James (23:45)
Well, mean, Durham was in the northeast of England, was famous for its tailors and it was particularly famous for the quilts that many people have evolved in the textiles industry made. So Durham had some of the finest quilts in the world, 100, 150 years ago. There are many people who think that the great quilts, know, the quilting traditions of the States, the Amish traditions of the States were essentially introduced by

British quilt makers when they moved across the Atlantic from both Durham and from Wales in particular and brought those skills ⁓ to the States. then, of course, American quilters took those quilts to a level that was even higher than those produced in Britain. So, you never know. Your ancestors may have been involved in establishing the Great American Quilt, which is one of the great American crafts.

Jonathan Thomas (24:42)
Well, mean, again, like a light bulb. I live an hour from Amish country where you can buy them. You can watch them make the most beautiful quilts ⁓ and you can buy all the things to make quilts yourself. And actually my wife is a quilter. She's made her own quilts. So it's continuing the tradition there.

James (24:48)
Mm-hmm.

It's a great craft actually and I finished the book with a quilting group in Wales. They meet in a little village called Bethlehem. There is actually a village in Wales called Bethlehem and these quilters meet there every week or so. And quilting is an incredible craft. In Britain, we have looked down on it for decades and seen it as old fashioned and dowdy. It's mostly Americans who have recognized the extraordinary cultural value of their quilts.

And in fact, it took an American to come over to Britain to start to teach us to recognize this value. And she established the first quilt museum in Wales, it was the first quilt museum in the UK, although it happened to be in Wales. And she has been spreading the gospel of quilts and how important they are to our heritage and also to bonds between people, because typically people make quilts for people they love. It's taken a long time. I'm sure your wife will tell you this.

takes a long time to make. You often make them with fabrics that are themselves very valuable to you and you then will give them to a loved one. It's an amazing thing to do.

Jonathan Thomas (26:05)
It's a true act of love because there's probably hundreds of hours that go into making just a simple quilt. Even a simple quilt is so much skill. Even using a sewing machine like my wife does, still takes so long to get it right. So many of the people you feature in the book and that you met are kind of the last of their kind. Do they see themselves as...

James (26:12)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (26:31)
preserving a tradition and or simply living their lives as makers and do they have plans to kind of continue the tradition or is it going to stop with them?

James (26:40)
I think it's a bit of both actually. I I think that I met, instance, a wheelwright down in Devon in the southwest of England, whose family had been wheelwrights since the 14th century. I met ⁓ just in the same village, there is a man who runs a tannery, which produces leather. And that tannery has been operating on that site pretty much continuously.

since Roman times. So he's operating a building that has been working for 2000 years minimum. And there are a number of places where there is just one person left or one business left the Bell Foundry I talked about before is the only Bell Foundry left in the country. There's only one Bell tuner left in the country. And they definitely feel that they are custodians of a very fragile heritage that is disappearing all around.

Jonathan Thomas (27:13)
boggling.

James (27:35)
But they're also doing the work because they're trying to make a living like the rest of us. know, they're trying to, that's what they know, it's what they've been taught. And they're trying to pay their bills and keep a float and to keep running their family businesses. So I think it's a bit of both of those things. And I think one of the challenges that so many crafts people face is getting hold of apprentices, because that is ultimately how you sustain skills. That's how you keep the traditions going.

In the past it was easy to recruit apprentices because basically everyone did what their parents did pretty much and people didn't have much of a choice. But now of course anyone who leaves university or leaves school can travel across the country, they can take up any kind of job they like, they can move into different sectors, they can start one thing, try for a year, move to another thing. It's much harder to recruit apprentices now and that is the biggest challenge really that we face in trying to keep these crafts going.

Jonathan Thomas (28:36)
Now forgive me, I'm going to get a little philosophical here. And that's one thing I want to get across about the book to our listeners is that the book is a meditation on these crafts and on Britain and the landscape. if you, if you love books like that, you're going to love this book. Now in an era dominated by mass production and AI, which is the new buzzword, what can traditional craftsmanship teach us about meaning, patience and value?

James (29:03)
Well, I think that that is a very important and complex question, Jonathan. I think that we're living through an industrial revolution right now, the AI revolution that everyone is talking about. And I think that this revolution has one thing in common with the industrial revolution that preceded it. So the industrial, both of them ultimately have separated us, have dislocated us as human beings from the time and effort it takes.

to make things. you know, in the 1800s, you introduce a machine that can spin wool much quicker than a human being can, hundreds of times quicker than a human being can. And that whole connection between that sense of how long it takes to spin a yarn of wool is lost. And then now you move to the present day and an AI, your large language model can produce an essay for a student in a fraction of a second.

where only a couple of years ago that student would have had to sort of toil away for weeks, for days and days in a library to write that essay. This is really worrying. I think there are some positives, of course, know, AI is AI, like any industrial revolution, is going to make things more efficient, it's going to make things more productive. But by severing us from the effort it takes to make something, we lose a great deal of that value, because often the things that take time

The things that require patience, the things that are difficult are the things that are most valuable. And if you don't learn those skills, you don't learn that sometimes you've got to really struggle to get something done and that something might take you days and days and days to do, then I think that you aren't learning a really important lesson in life. So I think that craft can remind us in this age that sometimes you need to

Use your fingers and work hard and take time and have patience and do something carefully and work in the material world with your body rather than just scrolling through a screen or tapping in ⁓ some kind of prompt to an AI system.

Jonathan Thomas (31:19)
Yeah, that's something that we've had to deal with ourselves, know AI You know, I can I can have give AI a nice prompt I can Have it write me a chapter of a book, but when you read the result You know, it will just it's like it gets like 80 % there. There's no soul. There's no warmth. There's no you know as we as writers know that

It can take weeks to get a chapter in a book written and get it right. And AI doesn't have to sit and ponder about the thing. It just pulls all of its information and spits out a facsimile of what you think, what it thinks you want to see. And it doesn't, it doesn't bear any marks of human creativity. And it only has the creativity of all the IP that it's stole to make, to make what it just created. And it's, you know, it,

James (32:12)
Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (32:14)
AI has its uses as a business owner. I use it all the time for, for things, but they can't replace, like you said, the craftsmanship that goes into writing that.

James (32:25)
No, mean, me, let me, and for

instance, let me ask you this. Can an AI system, I'm referring to your wife here, okay, can an AI system gather a lifetime's worth of fabrics, fabrics that mean something that have been collected in different places over a long period of time, and then spend hundreds of hours, maybe years, stitching with her own hands, lovingly, carefully,

an object, a quilt, that she is then going to give to someone she loves. AI can't do that. And even if it could, we wouldn't want it because the value of a crafted object derives directly from the fact that it has been made slowly, carefully, lovingly by a human being, by a sentient person. So I think that craft remains a really important antidote to the AI age. I'm not denying

modernity. I'm not denying tech, as you say, it's very, very useful tool in many ways, but we also need things that aren't absorbable by large language models.

Jonathan Thomas (33:32)
Yeah, just thinking in the art realm, you could feed every Turner painting into an AI model. And you could say, I want you to create me a Turner painting of this subject. it would make an approximation of a Turner painting, but it wouldn't be a Turner painting. And you would know that. And you could tell because he was a singular creator that existed at a certain period of time. All the conditions that led to him.

being the genius that he was cannot be replicated by an algorithm.

James (34:07)
No.

And our algorithms are inherently unoriginal because ultimately they are working with stuff that is already there. So true originality, I think, is impossible for AI.

Jonathan Thomas (34:19)
Well,

and I don't mean to denigrate software engineers, but software engineers aren't artists when they write these algorithms. They don't necessarily understand art the way an art historian like you would, or a way someone who enjoys art would. They understand it in terms of math and process and how can it be engineered? yeah, it could go on and on about this topic.

James (34:46)
We've done our rant, haven't we? I'm very pleased about it. Friday, Friday,

Friday rant.

Jonathan Thomas (34:50)
Yeah.

All right. We'll move on then. ⁓ So ⁓ each chapter of the book is rooted in a particular landscape, Yorkshire, Shetland, Sheffield, Scotland, Wales. How does geography and geology shape the crafts you describe? Because there's a reason that certain crafts are done in certain places.

James (35:11)
profoundly shapes them. Let me give you one example, Jonathan. Dry stone walling. So in Britain, have Britain, as Americans will know, is a tiny country. I don't know, I don't know what size, what equivalent state is the same size. It's probably certainly much smaller than California. ⁓ Maybe say Michigan. But in this small country, we have 125,000

Jonathan Thomas (35:31)
Michigan maybe.

James (35:41)
miles of dry stone walls. That is 10 times longer than the Great Wall of China. ⁓ And the amazing thing about those walls is that everywhere you go, they are different. And one of the reasons they're different is because of the geology. They're different because although Britain is very small, we have a very, complex and diverse geological makeup, ⁓ which means that as you go from place to place, you see the different rocks that have

that have been unearthed from that particular landscape. If you go to the Lake District, for instance, which is still seen as the greatest walling country in the world because of its geological diversity, as you move from honestly from field to field, you see the rocks change. You see walls go from being sandstone to limestone to granite to slate. And I think that is a perfect example of how a craft

can be shaped by something that might seem almost invisible to us, by the ground beneath our feet, by the rocks that were formed millions of years before human beings even appeared on this earth.

Jonathan Thomas (36:48)
Yeah. And on the topic of dry stone walls, a few years ago, I was in the Lake district for a writer's retreat. ⁓ the author James Rebanks was doing something called the rule writers Institute and he's a sheep farmer. And so his farm has dry stone walls galore. And one of the sessions we did was there was a big hole in one of his dry stone walls. And so he, with a fellow farmer, a friend of his

showed us how they repair a dry stone wall. And all of us were completely shocked at the craftsmanship that goes into fixing a dry stone wall and making it stand properly. And it was so interesting to think of these two farmers as craftsmen who you wouldn't even think they're, you think they're sheep farmers. They're not craftspeople, but they're sitting there. They even had their own language of the different kinds of rocks and where they would go and

Once they got going and they had fixed the wall, was like watching magic happen because it was so singular.

James (37:54)
Yeah, I mean, I think that, ⁓ you know, in the past, obviously, every farmer would have to have been able to repair their walls because walls would come down in a storm. And so they would need to be able to do that. the same and the set by the same token, fishermen would have to be able to repair their sails and fix their boats and make their equipment and make their gear. So I think that in the past, again, it's that point I made earlier, which is that craft used to be everywhere. Everyone used to have hands.

because they needed hand skills. So I think that's something that we have largely lost. There are still farmers in the UK who will know how to gap a wall, as they call it, if you're repairing a part of a wall that's broken. And James Rebanks is a perfect example of that.

Jonathan Thomas (38:40)
Yeah. So King Charles is a known supporter of these little crafts and I believe he supports them through, ⁓ the name escapes me, one of his estates in Scotland that he was a big advocate of restoring. ⁓ What role has he played in keeping some of these crafts alive?

James (38:59)
A very significant role. ⁓ know, people often think of Charles, he's sometimes ridiculed a bit in the UK and he's often seen as a fuddy-duddy, as a very old-fashioned. In certain ways, Charles has been unbelievably ahead of his times in terms of being progressive. So he has led the world in many ways in terms of developing organic produce, in terms of environmentally friendly agricultural production.

for decades, long before it became widely known. And he has also been supporting the crafts for 30, 40 years in really very significant ways. And long before craft was fashionable, long before other organizations came along to support.

crafts. Charles was doing it so in 1990 he formed something called the Prince's Foundation. It has since become the King's Foundation which throws an enormous amount of money in traditional crafts around the country and it's associated with lots of other different institutions. There's Highgrove, his house, there's Dalkeith.

Palace up in Scotland. There's also the King's, the Traditional Arts Foundation, which is in London. And he has really done an enormous amount to support the crafts in this country. He deserves an immense amount of respect for that.

Jonathan Thomas (40:22)
Yeah, he's even a competitive hedgerow lair, which again, that's craftsmanship that people may not even think about that laying a hedgerow that there are hundreds of thousands of miles of those in English countryside. Those are all laying by human hands and

James (40:35)
Yeah,

do you have hedgerows much in the US?

Jonathan Thomas (40:40)
No, we don't at all. Farm fields are bordered usually by nothing. ⁓

James (40:44)
Yeah, well,

we have, mean, you know, in the UK, fields are generally much smaller than they are in the US. And typically they are bounded by things, by sort of products of craft, by hand laid ⁓ hedges, by handmade stone walls. And it's one of the things I'm sure you know, Jonathan, you know the country very well. It's one of the things that gives Britain its particular character, its particular personality in the countryside. Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (40:51)
Yeah.

Yeah. The patchwork quilt from, you know,

yeah, it gives the landscape. It creates the landscape we expect England to be. And when you, when you compare it to the landscape here, and I don't mean to denigrate the landscape here, but here, like in here in Indiana, ⁓ Indiana is mostly farmland. 200 years ago, before Indiana was settled, it was a vast forest. The forest was cleared. Now it's all mostly farmland. And

The farmland is not, it's mostly flat. It's not interesting to look at it's, you know, and it's monoculture. We grow two things in Indiana, soybeans and corn. Who knows how much longer we'll be growing soybean, but it's, ⁓ and when you look at, know, I, spent a lot of time walking along my local roads here because I live in the country. and yeah, there's nothing that borders the fields. It's literally the corn starts and it goes on and that's actually a problem. And.

James (42:06)
Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (42:09)
You know, it's in that intensive agriculture has led to natural disasters here in the U S because we don't, didn't border our land with anything. And we, that like the famous dust bowl. ⁓ and then that led to people saying, maybe we should plant trees at the edge of farmland. So a lot of farmlands will have, like a forest or the light forestry edge around them. ⁓ but even around here in Indiana, a lot of farmland doesn't have any border at all. And so.

James (42:20)
Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (42:34)
If it's really dusty or really dry, there'd be a little mini dust storm going through the area. It's really bizarre.

James (42:40)
Yeah, mean, we have very, different landscapes. And one of the things that you have in the States that we don't have so much in the UK is you have unbelievable wild landscapes, particularly in the West part of the States that are truly breathtaking to any British person. And what we have in Britain is a very human landscape. It's ⁓ a landscape that is the result of small communities farming, ⁓

Jonathan Thomas (42:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

James (43:09)
creating resources, ⁓ building things by hand, whether it's laid hedges, whether it's dry stone walls, whether it's little fields, whether it's coppice woodlands. And that is the kind of ⁓ landscape that I suppose Britain is famous for. Whereas the US, everything's bigger. It's bigger in terms of its agriculture, it's bigger in terms of its mountains and its deserts, which is exciting in many ways for a British person.

Jonathan Thomas (43:31)
Yeah,

well, and that makes me think, you know, ⁓ there isn't an inch of the British landscape that hasn't been touched by man in some way. It's a very, you said it's a very human landscape. That reminds me of when I remember reading when they were choosing where to film the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And even though the Lord of the Rings trilogy is set in a proto-Britain that Tolkien was creating a mythology for,

They couldn't film it in the UK because the landscape was too human. That's why they chose New Zealand, because it was much more wild.

James (44:06)
Yes, that is true. I, my understanding is that they're with the new series, they are actually filming that in the UK. I think so anyway. But you're completely right. Yes, New Zealand was what what maybe England looked like 300 years ago or 400 years ago, whatever it was. But the thing I should say is very interesting, Jonathan, is that if you went back in time, say, a thousand years, there would be no hedgerows, there would be no dry stone walls in the British landscape. It was very much a wider

Jonathan Thomas (44:14)
Yeah, yeah, which is bizarre. Yeah.

Mm-mm. Be forced.

James (44:36)
open landscape of hay meadows and open fields and relatively undifferentiated land. the landscape that we have in Britain, which is this patchwork quilt, is a product of modern social change. It's a product of land ownership changing in the 18th and 19th centuries. So most of the dry stone walls we have in this country are not very old by our standards anyway. They're 250 years old or something like that. And the hedgerows

similar age. So those are themselves, they're not ancient practices, they are relatively modern practices. So yes, and I mentioned that in the book.

Jonathan Thomas (45:17)
Yeah, let's not diverge into enclosure and all the things that that led to. But that could be, we could talk, have a whole podcast about that. ⁓

James (45:22)
Ha

Jonathan Thomas (45:28)
Were there any particular individuals, perhaps a maker or a mentor, who profoundly changed the way you think about human skill?

James (45:36)
⁓ so many, every single one of them. suppose, I suppose that the people who I suppose astonish me the most were those who had found craft by themselves through

complete dogged determination ⁓ and through this amazing force of will. And so I suppose the man who impressed me the most was a man called Roger Smith. Now Roger was a very ordinary boy who grew up in Bolton in the north of northwest of England and he decided he wanted to become a watchmaker and he spent seven years in his parents'

seven years making this watch from scratch by hand entirely by himself just with secondhand materials and equipment and everyone thought he was mad when he was a teenager he was doing this 17 18 years old everyone thought he was mad well that watch sold in the States only two years ago the watch he made for 4.9 million dollars and he is now

Jonathan Thomas (46:45)
God.

James (46:48)
one of the greatest watchmakers in the world. has a watchmaking workshop on the Isle of Man, island between the north-west of England and Northern Ireland, that produces some of the finest watches in the world. They retail for a minimum of £300,000 each. And I suppose it was this determination he had. And again, we talked about this before, how in the AI age, often we want things to be easy. We expect things to be easy.

not

to have to strive for things. But for him, he lost seven years of his life for no payment whatsoever in a cold garage to achieve something and to achieve it because it was difficult and ended up becoming a master

of his craft and so I think that's a lesson that all of us can learn whichever field or industry we're in that you know often if you just stick at it you stick at something and you work hard and you go again and again and again and you strive for excellence you strive for perfection however difficult that may be there are great rewards there and so that was a very valuable lesson

Jonathan Thomas (47:59)
Do you think that's a particularly British trait striving like that for perfection ⁓ in a skill or a trade?

James (48:07)
I don't think so. think it's something that is common all over. It's not common, but it's present all over the world. I think it's probably diminishing everywhere for the reasons we've described. But I've encountered, I've traveled all over the world for my broadcast work and I've met extraordinary, for instance, American.

artisans, extraordinary Japanese artisans, extraordinary Italian artisans, all of whom are doing similar things. So I think it's something that is just common to humanity, ⁓ but unfortunately not as common as it used to be.

Jonathan Thomas (48:45)
Well, when people ask me for advice on web stuff or writing or anything, just, my advice is always do the work. You have to put the work in. If you put the work in and you keep at it, eventually someone will recognize it and find value in it.

James (49:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, they say the 10,000 hours, don't they? it's the same for the, you know, the people who are great sports people, the great tennis players, the great athletes. They're not just naturally like that. It didn't come easily to them. They work their butts off to to become good at what they're doing. And so I think that, you know, that is for me, you know, all the people I know who are successful are successful because they they work.

hard and they do not give up and they've dedicated to themselves to doing something and to doing it right and I think that if people feel they can just get something quick and easy they're probably not going to succeed in the long run or at least the work that what they produce the work they produce is not going to be great.

Jonathan Thomas (49:49)
Well, and raw talent can only get you so far. That talent has to be sculpted. So many of these crafts seem intensely physical. Did you try your hand at any of them yourself? And how did that experience shape your writing?

James (50:03)
I tried one. I mean, I do quite a bit of crafting myself in my spare time. Well, I make paintings, I draw, I cut my own hair, I do pottery, I do a bit of woodwork here and there, I'm handy around the house. But you know, this is not serious, serious stuff. ⁓ But I only really tried one craft that I...

was writing about in the book and that was we've talked about already was dry stone walling and I thought it would be very easy actually dry stone walling I saw them laying those stones up on the hill and I thought I'll give it a go and as soon as I started doing it I realized it is far more difficult than you think it's a very simple craft in many ways it's just simply the act of finding the right stone for the right spot putting it in the right place but that in itself is extremely difficult and

Yeah, was there. The brief description I have of me, my attempt to try Stonewalling is I don't come out of it very well, I should say. I embarrass myself greatly.

Jonathan Thomas (51:06)
You mentioned that over half of Britain's traditional crafts are now endangered. What do you think it would take socially, economically, politically to kind of keep them alive?

James (51:16)
Well, yes, it's true. Half of all of Britain's traditional crafts are endangered. A quarter of them are critically endangered.

In some cases, they just survive, you know, off the base of one surviving practitioner. But it's also important to say, Jonathan, before I talk about that, that there are many crafts that are doing really well. There are many crafts that are thriving. There are many crafts that are being resurrected. There are many new crafts with new technologies that are emerging all the time. So it's a very mixed picture. And we shouldn't simply focus on the sad side of the story. There's a really positive side of the story.

That said, think there is a great deal more that Britain and other developed countries can do to support the crafts. There are some countries that are really good at it, so Japan for instance, and South Korea, and Italy, and France.

are really very good at supporting their crafts. They have something called a living national treasure. So if you are a ⁓ top crafts person in Japan or South Korea or even in France, you can be called a living national treasure where the state actually pays you to promote your craft and to pass it on. We do not have such a scheme in the UK. There's no such scheme, I believe, in the US either. And that's a problem. I think the biggest problem, as I've said before, is apprenticeships.

there's woefully little support for apprenticeships in the UK. So if the UK really wants to make a difference to craft and to make it more viable, it needs to invest more significantly in its apprenticeship schemes.

because if you are a small business owner, as most craftspeople are, they're often one-man bands, it's a major commitment of time, effort and money to recruit an apprentice and it's very difficult to find apprentices. And then often you can spend years training an apprentice and they won't stay the course. So it's a major commitment ⁓ and there just isn't enough support at the moment.

is one big change that could be made. I'm ⁓ sceptical as to whether it will be made. Money is tight in the UK as it is in the US and around the world, but that would make a big difference.

Jonathan Thomas (53:41)
So your family background includes goldsmiths, tailors, and violin makers. Did researching craft land change how you see your own family's heritage?

James (53:50)
A little bit, yes. I mean, it reminded me of something I said earlier, which is that all of us ultimately have this journey in our past.

But I suppose the one thing that really transformed it for me is I grew up in a part of the country, the UK, that is not taken very seriously and called Bedfordshire. It's just north of London. It's one of the most so-called boring parts of the country that no one really ever bothers to visit. I don't know if there's an equivalent in the US. What would be the equivalent of us of bland just outside the city? Maybe somewhere like Scranton? I don't know where.

Jonathan Thomas (54:27)
Yeah, like the office.

Yeah.

James (54:28)
where the office is set. don't know,

Bedfordshire is that kind of place. But when I started looking into this book, what I realized is that actually Bedfordshire has the most amazing heritage and crafts, the amazing center of hat production and lace making and brick making. It's got one of the finest crafts people in the world working there at the moment of rush weaver called Felicity Irons. And it reminded me that, you know, wherever you come from,

whether it's Bedfordshire in England or it's Indiana in the United States, that there is a craft history, a manufacturing history to uncover, that there is a heritage that's still alive and you will find people doing remarkable things if you look hard enough. So that is, I suppose, what the lesson of the book is, is that if you look around you, if you open your eyes, if you turn over the stones, if you look through the windows, without getting arrested of course, you will find creativity.

you will find something interesting happen.

Jonathan Thomas (55:28)
Well, and one answer you've managed to answer all of my last few questions. So we will, we will wrap it up there then. So what a fascinating conversation this was and what a beautiful reminder that the story of Britain is also the story of its makers. Thank you for joining us on the Anglotopia podcast. James Craftland in search of lost arts and disappearing trades is available now from crown in the U S and Bodley head in the UK. And it's a book, every lover of British history and craftsmanship.

James (55:33)
good.

My pleasure.

Yes.

Jonathan Thomas (55:58)
should have on their shelf. Ooh, that's a very, ooh, very nice. If you, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, or leave a comment wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like early access to do episodes and help support independent long form writing about British history, culture, and travel, please consider joining the Friends of Anglotopia Club. Thank you again, James. And thank you for listening.

James (56:00)
That's the UK one, that's the UK cover. So we've got both. Thank you.