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.

Guest review by Ann Turnbull: BLACK COUNTRY by Liz Berry

Ann Turnbull writes stories for young people of all ages. Her young adult novel No Shame, No Fear was shortlisted for both the Guardian and Whitbread awards. Since the 1970s Ann has lived a mere twenty miles or so north-west of the Black Country, so its accent is familiar – but her own accent remains stubbornly south-east London.

I came upon Liz Berry’s work by chance while writing a historical novel set in the Black Country. I was searching online for a book about the local dialect, and among the phrase books was Liz Berry’s book of poems. Poetry sounded like a more enjoyable way of getting the feel of the dialect so, by a happy chance, I bought that instead.

In the end, hardly any dialect found its way into my novel, but this book awakened in me a renewed interest and enthusiasm for poetry. I became immersed in these poems, loved them, and read them over and over again.

Black Country is a celebration of the region – its people, their work, their landscape and history. Like Liz Berry, I believe that the voices of ordinary people – those strong, resonant voices – should be celebrated. They carry, as folk songs do, the stories of working people’s lives and history. So here are the canals (‘cuts’), nail-making and chain-making industries, pits, pubs, food – and here is the authentic voice of the people:

“bibble, fittle, tay, wum,
vowels ferrous as nails, consonants
you could lick the coal from.”

There’s the world of work:

“Nailing was wenches’ werk.
Give a girl of eight an anvil and a little ommer
and by God er’d swing it,
batter the glowing iron into tidy spikes…”

And, when work was done, there were the pigeons beloved of colliers

“whose onds grew soft as feathers
just to touch you, cradle you from egg
through each jeth-defying tumble.”

There are sensual, lyrical poems about love and sex, funny poems, dark ghostly tales, poems based on family letters and stories. This is a collection of great variety – of ideas, and of styles and rhythms, with depths and subtleties that become apparent on re-reading. There is a beautiful precision in the use of language. On Christmas Eve the Black Country is ‘tinselled by sleet’ which ‘fattens and softens to snow’; a teacher ‘unhooked a high window on a stuffy day/and heard the room’s breath’; pigeons fly ‘jimmucking the breeze’.

The collection carries throughout the theme of a girl growing up and leaving home, and the imagery of birds is used to describe her awakening to adult life, love, sensuality and eventual flight:

“then an exultation of larks filled the clouds
and, in my mother’s voice, chorused:
Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the winter.”

What I love most about this collection is the warmth and tenderness that lies at the heart of all its variety. My own favourite section is the last, in which the poet returns to her childhood – in particular to her father who, the summer before she started school,

“…made me a boat of words
and pushed us off from the jetty into the Sea of Talk.”

This poem ends:

“Bab, little wench, dow forget this place,
its babble never caught by ink or book,
fer on land, school is singin’ its siren song
and oysters clem their lips upon pearls in the muck…”

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Black Country, her debut collection, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2014, and has received many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2014.