Some of Britain’s oldest artisanal traditions — from dry stone walling in West Yorkshire to coopering, making barrels, in Bushmills, Northern Ireland — are on the verge of extinction.
At least that is what James Fox, an art historian at the University of Cambridge, has warned in his new book, “Craftland: In Search of Lost Arts and Disappearing Trades.” Blending travelogue with reporting, the book — published in Britain by The Bodley Head in September and scheduled for release in the United States by Crown on Oct. 28 — delineates Dr. Fox’s passionate case for crafts.
“If your only definition of craft is something very traditional, you’re confining it to the past and to heritage,” he said. “Craft is a living tradition — a vital tradition — as relevant today as it has ever been.”
During a recent video interview from the Hugo Burge Foundation, an arts and crafts charity in southeastern Scotland, where he is the creative director, Dr. Fox talked about his inspirations, his belief that artificial intelligence cannot replace artisans and the joy he has found in a handmade pair of scissors. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What prompted you to write a book about Britain’s endangered crafts?
It’s no secret that we are living through a revolution in tech and in A.I. that is already changing the way we live, the way we work, the way we make, even the way we think. So it seemed like a really good time to look back at older ways of working, older ways of making, partly to describe them before they potentially disappear, but also partly to see what we might be able to learn from them.
How did you decide which crafts to highlight?
In the U.K., we have a red list. Every two years, an organization called Heritage Crafts does a survey of the state of the nation in terms of craft. And they go through every craft that’s being practiced in the country and they work out whether they’re viable, endangered, critically endangered or extinct.
And the last most recent survey found that about half of all traditional British crafts are endangered. And about a quarter — that’s about 72 — are critically endangered.
Critically endangered means they’re sustained by maybe just one person, one business. And if that business folds or that person dies, that is potentially the end of a long tradition.
We have lost, in the U.K., five traditional crafts in the last 10 years. Gold beating is one of them. Cricket ball making is one of them. Lacrosse stick making is another one. So we are seeing crafts disappear all the time. And that was, in a way, my jumping-off point.
Who are some of the craftspeople that made an impression on you?
Felicity Irons is one such person. When she was a young woman, she suffered a terrible car accident in Australia. She ended up trying to find a career that she could do standing up because it was the only way she could deal with her back injury — and she took to rush weaving.
Rush weaving used to be an enormous industry in the U.K. and in the United States. Before we had plastic, rushlike willow was one of these all-purpose materials. You made a carpet or a basket. You made clothing, a rug, some furniture. You could do all kinds of things with this plant. And then the practice died out during the 20th century. By the 1990s, there was hardly any rush weaving happening on either side of the Atlantic.
Felicity found an old guide to rush weaving, and she taught herself how to do it. And she brought this whole practice back from the brink. She’s now one of the greatest craftspeople almost in the world.
And one of the clever things she’s done is she has pivoted this very old trade to the modern age. So she’s now doing yoga mats and sunglasses cases and she’s working with Hollywood — she did the mats in “Game of Thrones.” She’s proven that craft can respond to the needs of today.
Did writing the book make you think differently about handmade objects?
Writing this book has made me think that, actually, there is a better model in which you buy less, but you buy better. You buy slightly more expensive objects that will last longer and, actually, you do save money in the long run. Crafted objects are more expensive, but they’re expensive because you’re paying for a human being’s time.
There’s a chapter in the book about scissors. You can buy a cheap pair of scissors from a supermarket for a few pounds, a few dollars. They won’t be much fun to use. They’ll probably break. And you’ll replace them several times over the course of a life.
But I got a pair of scissors that are handmade from this company in Sheffield. And I spend most of my life now walking around the house looking for excuses to use them. They’re probably 10 times more expensive than the average pair of scissors, but I know I will have them for the rest of my life and that I will then probably give them to my children. I think that’s a price worth paying.
Any thoughts on how the future of craft will unfold in a world increasingly driven by automation and A.I.?
I currently feel pretty confident that A.I. is not going to have a devastating effect on the crafts. If you think about it, can A.I. climb a mountain through the rain and wind and gather up loose rock and then build a dry stone wall that will last for 100 years?
If we talk about one of the great American crafts, can A.I. collect a lifetime’s worth of fabric and then devote years to making a quilt for someone it loves? It can’t do those things. And even if it could, we wouldn’t want it because the value of a crafted thing is derived directly from the fact that it is being made over time by a human being.
I say in the conclusion of the book that quilting is an art of love. It’s something that one human typically makes for another. And the magic of that object is the fact that it often takes years to make.
As we move ever more into a digital virtual world, the yearning for real physical things will at the very least not go away but will probably get even stronger.
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