“Craft is not a niche pursuit”

“We are a species that makes things,” says writer James Fox. “We have always made things and built with our hands. Some people make paintings and some people make pots, some people make baskets and some people make sculptures. It’s all part of what human beings do.”

He is talking about the impetus behind his new book Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades, published in September 2025. It’s a fascinating journey around the country, stopping to meet a huge variety of artisans and makers along the way. Fox himself will admit that his selection isn’t complete - that task would have been impossible - but he does introduce us to the Yorkshire siblings who are probably the best drystone wallers in the world, to the workers who handcraft watches in the Isle of Mann, to the woman who learned and revived the craft of rush cutting and weaving. There are letter cutters in Oxford, a Jewish scribe in London, a wheelwright in Dorset, cutlers, coopers, bell founders and many more.

“There are so many craftspeople, many of whom work in obscurity, and I wanted to write about them with the same care and reverence that I had previous written about painters and sculptors. Fox is an art historian. He is the director of studies in History of Art at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the creative director of the Hugo Burge Foundation. He has made several documentaries, including Nature and Us, a history of the natural world told through art objects, for the BBC, and has published a previous book, The World According to Colour: A Cultural History.

He wanted to play a part in the shifting conversation about the perceived value of craft work. |”Historically, art historians created this distinction between fine art and craft, and it was nearly always to the benefit of art. Artists, who were nearly always white men, were geniuses. Craft was lesser and done by women and peasants and people from the other side of the world. It’s not a current distinction and, for me, it’s one that has never made any sense at all.”

He also wanted to capture this particular moment in time, where the forces of money and technology are pushing through changes and where some crafts are quite literally dying out, with knowledge being lost practitioner by practitioner.

“We're living through an industrial revolution right now, a revolution in tech and AI that is really changing the way we live, the way we work, the way we make, even the way we think,” says Fox. “Many crafts were undermined by the first industrial revolution, and so I thought it was a good moment, as we go through this transformation that is going already changing the nature of work and the nature of skill, to look at some of these older ways of doing things.”

His love for skill, his reverence for the handmade shines through the book. As does his belief that craft has a place within our changing world. His thinking goes further than preservation for preservation’s sake.

“Craft is absolutely part of our present,” he says. “It’s playing a very significant role, not just in individual lives and but also in our economy. The creative industries as a whole are one the fastest growing sectors in our economy. Craft is not a niche pursuit. The heritage craft sector alone is bigger than our fishing industry… it’s a part of economic activity that can be felt all over the country.”

And craft could become more even more vital in the future. “If we are trying to move towards a more circular economy, towards a greener economy, craft has many tried and tested, ready-made solutions and pathways to reach it. Most crafts are inherently sustainable. Most traditional crafts are using natural, renewable materials, local materials. And they model a particular kind of production and consumption that is more sustainable, in which smaller quantities of things are made. People buy better. They buy less. And they look after those things, rather than constantly throwing them away and replacing them with other cheap goods that have been manufactured across the world.”

Fox says he is not so naive as to believe that craft will save us all and move us all towards a greener economy, but it does offer a model. When talking to traditional thatchers in the Highlands, Fox notes that the industry could thrive again if the traditional skills were mixed with ecological ideas and leant in to the kind cultural heritage beloved by tourists. Why shouldn’t bus shelters and information points and tourist centres be built and thatched in a centuries old way? It’s charming, it’s sustainable and it would create jobs and stop a traditional practice from grinding to a halt.

He also points to the Devon fisherwoman, making and using willow lobster pots. “They are less efficient, they do catch fewer shellfish. But in many ways that’s a good thing. And if those pots do get lost at sea, there’s a higher chance the catch will escape, and the pot itself will eventually degrade and it won’t stay around forever like plastic.”

There are a number of future possibilities. The current drive to re-forest and re-wild more of the United Kingdom will create a need for more people with relevant skills. “We’re going to need woodland managers and coppicers to manage that,” he says.

The craftspeople Fox met on his journey were all “very different individuals… and some people found their trades by chance, or accident and some were continuing something their ancestors had started.” They did, however, have one thing in common. “A determination to do good work at all costs and to not take shortcuts,” he says. “To have the patience to do things meticulously and carefully, the pride they took in their work, their determination to do things correctly, their respect for their materials, their respect for their processes, would lead to their often pathological avoidance of shortcuts.” This is, in a world were productivity and efficiency savings are often seen as the only goal, deeply inspiring, he says.

Fox still draws daily, but says he doesn’t practice a craft outside of writing. “I think you could ask why a it isn’t a practitioner writing this book,” he says. “I'd say that there are loads of practitioners who have done books and memoirs about their own craft. And I think there's a benefit sometimes to have an outsider observing all these different practices. Craft is a much wider category than we might think. It is not just about working with wood or working with stone. It is a particular form of work in which you are trying to manipulate a material to make something…  And ultimately, this book is not about me doing things. It's about professional trades people and crafts people doing things and why, why their skills are so hard won and so important to preserve.”

He truly hopes that readers of his book will realise how enmeshed craft is in our lives and also see that there is still an extraordinary amount of creativity still bubbling away in every corner of the country. Even in the most unlikely places, there are remarkable people doing remarkable things.”

“I want people to emerge from the book, feeling inspired by the unbelievable quantity of creativity that Britain is still capable of,” he says, thinking about this very particular point in our history. “But I also want people to recognise that it's not a given.”

Main image: James Fox by Nancy MacDonald