Bookseller feature: Richard Hayden of THE RYE BOOKSHOP chooses CRAFTLAND by James Fox

 

"Craft, it is implied, is for hobbyists at home; instead, this tiny and shrinking minority do work. Hard work ... "

Richard Hayden and Emma McGrath

Launched ten years ago, The Rye Bookshop is one of the smallest in Waterstones’s range of boutique unbranded shops. All the stores in this select portfolio are in small towns and are granted greater autonomy and independence. As one might expect from a rural location, Rye specialises in nature writing but also features a wide selection of local books, the very best in new fiction and non-fiction, and a lovingly curated children’s section. 

Perhaps the first thing to strike you when you start reading James Fox’s Craftland is how few practitioners of the various skills on show actually consider themselves craftsmen or women. Craft, it is implied, is for hobbyists at home; instead, this tiny and shrinking minority do work. Hard work. 

Once, Britain was an entire land of manual workers, designers, builders, tinkerers, engineers, smiths, wrights, coopers, bodgers and Uncle Tom Cobley and all – people skilled with their hands and who profoundly understood their land and (whisper it) their craft. 

Fox sets out to show us that the country still produces the things it has always produced, just in far fewer and, regrettably, ever decreasing numbers, skills stripped away by dynamic changes in the local, national and global economies. 

As such, Craftland begins as a journey around the UK, looking for the pre- and post-industrial trades that have for varying reasons begun to fade away. It asks can they be saved? Should they be saved? The answer to both, of course, is yes, but Fox takes the questions further and looks at how it could (or, indeed, can) be done. 

During his search, Fox can often appear wide-eyed, almost naive, in his initial comprehension, but he is never mawkish nor sentimental. In fact, as he learns the details of the work and challenges, so the hardness of the lives lived by many of the practitioners is accented in his writing. These are often difficult lives. Hard but fulfilling. There are no wistful lingering looks back at a supposed long-lost comfortable bucolic existence.

 Instead, he explores the extent of the problems and then considers solutions: some theoretical, others already being put into practice. The significant issue faced by most of the British crafts featured is that as the economies around them changed so, too, did the nature of demand. For instance, Fox charts how hedges and fences replaced the dry-stone walls of farms in Northern England and Scotland simply because they were cheaper and easier to maintain. 

But, as Fox shows, many crafts can be repurposed to suit a modern market, saving the skillset from extinction – such as those dry-stone wall builders who now renovate property boundaries of private homes rather than miles of sheep farm. Or the woman who rescued river reed harvesting and turned it into an international export industry. Crucially, these efforts are not driven by charitable funding or heritage grants but by pure business sense. 

Craftland succeeds wildly in delivering upon its thematic promise. It is also a literary study in quality, written as it is in wonderfully accessible language and with a structure that explores its ideas clearly and with colour. Each chapter ends on a philosophically inclined portrait of the craft in action – renovated church bells ringing out for the first time in decades was an especially emotive sequence. 

In addition to the history and the interviews, Craftland is also full of amazing details about unique human elements of our home country, such as the fact that there are 5,000 change-ringing bell towers in England but only 300 in the rest of the world. Or that Scottish thatchers don’t use wheat straw or water reed, as their English counterparts do, but the much more recalcitrant local bracken, heather, marram grass or a whole host of other tough plants. 

Ultimately, Craftland is a history of the past but also of the present. Or, as Fox himself says: ‘The book is nostalgic... for the skills and traditions we think are gone but are actually all around us.’ There is also sadness within its pages as it charts Britain’s passage from the world’s workshop to the more service-based economy that is has become, showing the decline in manufacture, skill-based crafting, and the supply chain-led communities that once thrived here. 

While it admits that Britain is not necessarily materially poorer for that progress, it is perhaps socially and spiritually worse off. Or, at least, deeply changed in a way that has left many bereft. Craftland hopes to highlight the occasional hopeful streams of light that point to the benefits of human manufacturing: as much a history of a potential future as one of a recent past.

Craftland is published by Bodley Head.