Giles Kime is worried about the state of craftsmanship in Britain.
How many young people leave education with the ability to make a dovetail joint, use a lathe or plane a piece of timber? Sadly, very few — and a fraction of previous generations. Although skills such as furniture-making have been transformed by mechanised processes and digital technology, it’s an area where an understanding of craft remains vital. Nor is it a subject that is relevant to furniture alone; Heritage Crafts, the charity that supports traditional skills in Britain, has compiled a list of those that have an uncertain future in the UK, including rope-making, globe-making and passementerie. Once gone, they will be lost forever.
Does this really matter, you may ask, in a world of CNC machines and 3D printers? The answer is yes. Very much. Craft is not a quaint anachronism, but an opportunity to understand both materials and construction. The human hand has the capacity to make things that could never be created with a machine.
An understanding of how things are made is important for anyone with an ambition to be a great designer. ‘It’s an experience that gives you more confidence to design,’ Lord Snowdon told Country Life in July 2017. It is businesses such as Linley, the furniture-maker he founded nearly 40 years ago, as well as Soane Britain, its neighbour on London’s Pimlico Road, that have succeeded in keeping alive crafts that would otherwise have withered on the vine.
A reflection of how little craft is respected in the UK was evident when Soane Britain’s founder, Lulu Lytle, was pilloried by the press for her firm’s involvement in the renovation of Boris Johnson’s flat in Downing Street. The price of her painstakingly made furniture was gleefully compared with mass-produced equivalents, with no mention of the fact that it is made to last for generations.
Lulu Lytle, co-founder of Soane Britain. Credit: Simon Brown / Country Life
There was also no mention of the jobs Mrs Lytle has created, in particular when she established her own workshop in Leicester, hiring former employees from Angraves, the last rattan weavers in the UK, which had recently closed down. Soane Britain has 50 craftspeople on its staff and many more are employed by the 41 workshops it works with across the UK. Yet she was subjected to the vicious, misogynist jeering of poorly informed cut-and-paste journalism at its worst.
Thankfully, one person who does recognise the value of craft is The King; earlier this year, Mrs Lytle was awarded an OBE in his Birthday Honours list. As with so many causes he has successfully championed, from soil health to the importance of wool, it seems that, with his help, craft will one day be treated with the respect it deserves.
Giles Kime is Country Life’s interiors guru and Executive Editor. This leader article appears in the October 9, 2024 edition of Country Life.
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