Two weeks ago, Felicity Irons and her five-strong team of craftspeople waded out into the River Great Ouse at 7am, dodging the unseasonable rainstorms, to chop down swaths of reeds — the last of the harvest. “It’s an arduous process,” says the Bedfordshire-based weaver, who established her homewares company Rush Matters in 1992. Her team cuts two tonnes of rush a day by hand: they turn this sandy-toned, straw-like grass into table placemats, seat cushions, baskets, carpets and rugs.
With its roots in the Anglo-Saxon era, rush weaving — a process where the dried-out, metre-tall reeds are plaited by hand — is believed to be East Anglia’s oldest industry. Traditionally a craft done at home by women, it flourished during medieval times, when it was used to create mats to sleep upon. Today, its aesthetic is trending owing to the current taste for natural materials and tactility in the modern, millennial home.
Business for Irons, who has created store installations for Aesop and operates a studio within a barn on a working farm, is, she says, generally good. Instagram has been a useful tool for her to find new customers: Rush Matters has almost 15,000 international followers. “But we live in a very fast world, and there’s an expectation of immediacy,” she says. Made to order tableware takes eight to 10 weeks; carpets, 26. And customers don’t always want to wait, or pay the prices. “Every aspect of our work is handmade.”
As a craft, rush matting is at risk. It’s one of the traditional British crafts classed as “endangered” on the Heritage Craft Association’s red list. Alongside it you can find clock making, paper marbling and classic Scottish carpentry, specifically the crafting of Fair Isle armchairs with hand-woven backs. Tinsmithing is “critically endangered”, so is glass-eye making. All of the 150 or so at-risk crafts on the red list are in danger of dying out completely: cricket ball making is now entirely extinct in the UK.
“We borrowed the methodology from endangered animals,” says Daniel Carpenter, Heritage Crafts Association’s (HCA) executive director, who spearheaded the list in 2015. The charitable organisation, helmed by part-time staff, contributed to research to the UK government in 2012 showing that heritage craft added £4.4bn to the economy that year, employing 210,000 people.
“But we realised it was vulnerable, because 98 per cent of skilled practitioners are sole traders or micro businesses; they’re retiring, having made no provisions to pass their skills on.” The list was created as a means of mapping what was left — and raising the alarm.
Last week, the cause was given a boost when UK philanthropist Hamish Ogston’s foundation announced a £29mn donation to heritage skills training. To date, it’s the largest private commitment to the cause and will be used to fund placements in carpentry, plastering and stonemasonry among other techniques in the UK and Commonwealth. Ogston hopes the money will breathe new life into dying crafts, addressing the chronic shortages in the heritage sector “while opening up career paths for those who might never have imagined working in this area,” he says.
Awareness is key when it comes to preservation. Some 181 countries have signed up to the 2003 Unesco convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, which includes traditional craft. The UK, US, and Australia are among the few not currently ascribed. “As a nation, we’re really proud of our heritage, so why are our traditions not being protected?” says Eve Eunson, the last remaining maker of Fair Isle chairs, based in Shetland.
The Crafts Council in the UK is “more focused on contemporary crafts you’d see in a London art gallery,” says Carpenter. Wares in the Craft Council’s collection are presented as artistic objets, with works on display — not at-home objects to be used everyday. “We were set up because a number of craftspeople felt under-represented at a policy and funding level.” The Crafts Council did not respond to a request for comment.
Most craft industries suffered drastically during the 1980s, when industries were offshored and goods-making turned to mass production, says Elisabetta Lazzaro, a business professor of creative and cultural industries at the University for the Creative Arts in Surrey. Offshoring didn’t just hit UK makers’ revenues. “It possibly fostered knowledge transfer, such as design skills, towards those countries, making them direct competitors.”
“Not every craft needs to be saved,” says Carpenter. “Throughout history, crafts have died out and others have sprung up to take their place,” he says.
But he insists it’s wrong to render craft frivolous or irrelevant: to solely rely on imports or technology. “There’s a lot of very valuable knowledge that’s going to be essential to the next generation facing up to the challenges of environmental collapse,” he says. “When it comes to being more sustainable, [craft] is very valuable.”
Attracting new talent is an ongoing problem, however. Currently, very few craft apprenticeships are funded at a government level. Private schemes, such as those paid for by the Hamish Ogston Foundation, encourage training providers to run specific heritage courses. But in the main, schools cannot afford to put on a course for a handful of students.
At the end of the last century, New Labour’s focus on higher education only sped up the decline in workshop-based learning. Lucy Barlow, co-founder of London interiors company Barlow and Barlow, describes the policy as a “disaster” for the craft industry.
Blair’s “push, push, push” towards university meant “the apprenticeship scheme just got shoved to one side”, says Irons. Ernest Wright in Sheffield, one of the last remaining scissor-makers in the UK, has created its own, privately funded, five-year learning programme; it currently has three trainees being taught at the workbench.
These days, government-backed apprentice schemes tend to be aligned with the times, more readily available in industries such as data, tech and hospitality than in the workshop.
Lucy McGrath, a London-based paper marbler, hired her first employee under a business administration initiative: teaching marbling felt like it was secondary to skills she describes as “email admin and spreadsheet stuff”.
“I had to wangle one of my [former] apprentices into the business under a fashion and textiles scheme,” says Irons.
Many makers are sole traders, which complicates things: investing time in training a young person means time away from production schedules. Without goods to sell, there’s no income. “One of my biggest achievements in business today is having five salaried employees,” says Irons.
Amid a cost of living crisis, studios are also a luxury that few can afford. McGrath was awarded 114 sq ft of shared workshop space in Deptford, south London, via The Arts Society funding during the first year of her business: it saved her £300 a month. Today, she rents a 200 sq ft room, costing £570 a month. “It’s getting harder and harder to find affordable spaces . . . developers [have] snatched up previously industrial land.”
Talent is being left untapped. “Kids won’t even be aware of where their skills lay unless they have the chance to give it a go,” says Irons. Ernest Wright goes into local schools to recruit for its in-house training programmes; it also opens up the factory for tours to spread awareness locally and get local people interested.
Each morning, Eve Eunson, the Fair Isle armchair maker, pours herself a coffee and sits in her living room as the sun shines in. From here, she plaits her high seat backs, which are curved like a cocoon and crafted from wood and straw: each takes 50 hours to weave. She trained as a hobby rather than a paid apprentice, under a now-retired maker on the island.
Today, the former architect makes made-to-order wooden armchairs the traditional way. She estimates that fewer than 20 originals remain on the island. “I spent a lot of time on my great, great-uncle’s knee in one of those chairs, being told all the stories about the shipwrecks,” she says. Old chairs, popular in the 1800s, were made using wood washed up from the sea. “They’re a huge part of Scottish history and identity. And if we don’t preserve it, all that will be lost.”
Eunson cites retailers such as The New Craftsmen and Edinburgh-based Bard as drumming up a new appetite for age-old traditions. “People increasingly like the local element of making,” she says. But while shoppers may be drawn to traceable products with a back-story, the traditional Fair Isle silhouette — while beautiful — is also bulky, and not exactly suited to the size of smaller, modern homes.
Staying relevant and in tune with modern aesthetic tastes is key. Eunson has been working on a streamlined version, which she hopes will be an easier, more relevant, sell — its sleeker design would look at home in a Georgian town house or a Scandi-style apartment.
“From a consumer perspective, the things that some classic artisans are creating are beautiful, but it’s not what I would buy into,” says Mads Montagu-Andrews, founder of the Hampshire-based casting company Studio Bust. Founded in 2021, it hosts pop-ups in London, New York and Los Angeles and offers bespoke sculptures of a client’s own naked body: a sort of customised, mantelpiece-sized Venus de Milo. In a process that marries 3D scanning with traditional hand work, clients can choose from classic bronze finishes to contemporary, colourful lacquers.
Montagu-Andrews, 30, says this new lens has been pivotal in attracting her young customer base. Traditional bronze casters create expensive things like “majestic, bronze owls for the garden”, she says. “If I had 17 grand to spend, I wouldn’t be putting it towards that.” Her busts cost from £450.
London artist Denzel Currie, who goes by the moniker CurrieGoat, also offers a fresh take. He uses an electric hand tufting gun to create rugs in the shape of sneakers and other designs (rug tufting is classed as a “currently viable craft” by the HCA).
“Latch hooking and punch needling are the more traditional way to make, but they take more time,” says the former illustrator and graphic designer, who taught himself how to rug tuft with tutorials on YouTube. Each takes a week to make, and he sells predominantly to women aged 20 and up in the US through Instagram. “Feeling represented in a craft is important if you want people to invest time and money,” he says. “People need to see their interests reflected.”
Millennial makers naturally capture the interest of younger customers. “My colours are contemporary and bright, and I push the boundaries of the materials used,” says McGrath, founder of Marmor Paperie, which marbles ceramics alongside paper. Like Curry, McGrath uses videos on Instagram and TikTok as marketing. The “theatricality and immediacy of marbling” makes for good content. “It helps spread awareness, further than ever before,” she says. Irons agrees: she’s even done recruitment drives via Instagram, finding it more fruitful than employment agencies.
Technophobia among old-time makers, however, is real. Montagu-Andrews says she was turned down by numerous bronze-casting companies before she found one willing to work with her on the 3D scanning. “It was a difficult industry to tap into, especially with a very modern idea,” she says; her busts are primarily bought by women who are pregnant or celebrating a milestone birthday. “They didn’t really understand it and felt quite threatened by it. I’m lucky to have found my maker,” she says. “They’re very forward-thinking; they’re happy to experiment and collaborate.”
Increasingly, the foundry is connecting Montagu-Andrews to its other clients to find out how they might be able to better incorporate tech. And it’s this sort of cross-pollination of ideas that will help future-proof a craft’s viability, maybe helping some go from being vulnerable to viable on the list.
“We can inspire each other, and keep each other on our toes,” says Irons, who works with interior designers including JamesPlumb and hotels such as Heckfield Place. “It’s not about changing centuries-old techniques. It’s about changing how we see, value and champion them.” Her hope is that the UK government does the same — before it’s too late.
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