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Red List of Endangered Crafts at Craft Festival

Red List of Endangered Crafts at Craft Festival

DemonstratorsWhere: Mill Marsh Park, Bovey Tracey, Devon, TQ13 9AL
When: 9 to 11 June 2023, 10am to 5pm

Join us at Craft Festival in Bovey Tracey this June for a celebration of the practitioners of endangered crafts featured on the Red List of Endangered Crafts 2023 edition. Craft Festival is one of the most prestigious and much loved craft events in the UK. Over 200 of the UK’s finest makers will be exhibiting and this year’s programme is brimming with workshops for all ages, demonstrations, children’s activities and entertainment, street theatre, festival food and live music.

Our ‘Yurt of Endangered Crafts’ in 2019 was a huge success and we are back bigger and better than before with a ‘Marquee of Endangered Crafts’ to mark the recent launch of the 2023 edition. Come and meet our demonstrators and chat to them about how they are keeping their respective crafts alive!

  • Anna Rennie, maille making
  • Catherine Ade, lithography
  • Coates Willow, basketwork furniture making
  • Danni Bradford, reverse glass
  • Dave French and Sarah Ready, withy pot making
  • Hugh Dunford Wood, wallpaper making
  • Katie B Morgan, fairground art
  • Paula Carnell, bee skeps
  • Rachel O’Connell, marbling
  • Robert Ely, ribbon making
  • Two Rivers, paper making

Buy your tickets here

Heritage Crafts members receive a 10% discount on tickets – contact us for the discount code

Changes to how we approached the 2023 edition of the Red List

Every time we begin work on a new edition of the Red List we find that we need to make small changes to how we approach it, in order for the research to better reflect the changing reality of the world around us. In the 2023 edition the major change has been in how we define a craft.

 

How we previously defined a craft

Like any other broad category of culture, traditional craftsmanship is neither a continuum (like a rainbow), nor is it a collection of completely separate entities (like the elements in the periodic table). It can be made to seem like one or the other, depending on which analogy fits best at the time.

The Red List is partly based on lists of endangered animals, so it has served us well until now to think of crafts just like animal species, clearly distinct from each other. Animal species are not parts of a continuum, but are separated by the very real fact that different species cannot usually produce offspring together.

The question we have used to separate crafts has been: ‘Can a skilled practitioner move from one skill to another without substantial re-training?’ If the = answer is ‘yes’ then we have treated the skills as belonging to a single craft. If ‘no’ then we have treated them as two separate crafts.

There is of course the subjective matter of what constitutes ‘substantial re-training’, but overall this is the best way we have found to apply a methodology of endangerment to the complexity of crafts we see in the real world.

 

What’s the problem?

The problem with this method has become more apparent has time has gone on. Some crafts may employ the same basic skills but be separated by their cultural context. They might have a broad uptake across the country, but also have culturally significant manifestations that are specific to a particular geographic, ethnic or religious community of practice.

This has been especially problematic when a craft has enough practitioners nationwide to be classed as viable, but a particular culturallysignificant version of it is on the verge of extinction.

One example of this is Shetland lace knitting, in which a great many people around the country have participated, thanks to the many published pattern books and websites on the subject. At the same time there is a very particular community of practice within Shetland, producing lace in an unbroken lineage of skill passed on from one maker to the next, using the traditional double-pointed wires and leather knitting belt. It is within this cultural context that the craft is dwindling.

As a result of these two hitherto undifferentiated aspects, the inclusion of Shetland lace knitting in the previous edition of the Red List was quite naturally the matter of much debate and disagreement.

 

What’s the solution?

We believe that the Red List should absolutely be the place to champion the cultural distinctiveness of traditional craft practices, in the spirit of the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) upon which our work is based.

Therefore, with this edition we have begun to list crafts not just by virtue of their skill but also by their cultural specificity, especially when the crafts are more endangered than their more widespread equivalents. We have added six of these crafts in this edition and plan to add more in 2025.

A happy side-effect of this is to highlight where our work overlaps with the other four domains of ICH, including folk practices, festivals, religious beliefs and ways of seeing the work.

It will allow us to incorporate more crafts from diaspora and migrant communities that may resemble crafts previously practiced here, but with a significance intrinsically tied to the cultural groupings with whom they reside.

 

2023 crafts listed by virtue of their cultural context:

Thoughts on the 2023 edition of the Red List

by Mary Lewis, Heritage Crafts Endangered Crafts Manager

WMary Lewishen Heritage Crafts published the first edition of the Red List of Endangered Crafts back in 2017, the hope was that by repeating the research on a two-yearly basis, over time the changes would become less about improving the accuracy of the data, and more about reflecting real-world change… for good or for bad. It is only with this fourth edition (the second to be carried out with the generous support of the Pilgrim Trust), that we begin to see this hope come to fruition.

Six years in, we are able to point much more accurately to concrete examples of crafts that have fared better or worse since the research started, and even attribute some of the positive changes to the influence of the Red List itself. For example, with the publication of the last edition it became apparent that tinsmithing was a clear contender for the most endangered craft in the UK, with just one or two skilled craftspeople working irregularly, if at all.

We were able to award one of our Endangered Crafts Fund grants, with match funding from the Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers Alias Wire Workers, to run two week-long masterclasses at The Museum of Making in Derby. As a result, we now have several metalworking practitioners incorporating these skills into their businesses and continuing their own development within the craft; not enough to remove it from the critically endangered category altogether, but enough to prevent the extinction we feared.

Sadly the changes are by no means all positive. The cumulative effect of COVID-19, Brexit, the energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine, and the ensuing financial troubles have all had a brutal impact on many crafts businesses already struggling to make ends meet. I have spoken to so many craftspeople who are having to make heartbreaking decisions between buying in materials, keeping their workshops powered, and paying themselves even a minimum wage. This is all on top of the pre-existing structural issues such as the lack of training routes and government financial support for training.

We have always talked about the cultural loss that is borne every time a craft is lost, but over the last few years we have begun to notice another phenomenon. We increasingly see how crafts operate with a degree of inter-dependence. They form a complex ecosystem, with associated skills, supply chains and economies of scale that come with the level of specialisation you used to see in cities like Sheffield, Birmingham and Stoke. When one business closes, or one craft becomes extinct, it can have a knock-on effect on other allied crafts. The fear is that if we continue to witness this haemorrhaging of skills we may soon get to a tipping point, beyond which the collapse of heritage crafts in the UK accelerates exponentially.

The updated methodology we have developed for this edition has given me immense pleasure in allowing us to include a new cohort of culturally-significant crafts that would previously have been excluded (such as vardo art and living waggon crafts) and to better serve previous entries such as Shetland lace knitting. This will provide a robust basis upon which to consider a greater number of migrant and diaspora crafts for 2025.

As always, the Red List is an evolving process and we rely on craftspeople and experts to let us know of any omissions and changes that need to be addressed. Once again, a huge thank you to the hundreds of people who assisted with the research collation for this edition of the Red List, without whom this project would not be possible.

 

Craft skills under threat with 17 additions to the Red List of Endangered Crafts

Craft skills under threat with 17 additions to the Red List of Endangered Crafts

New research by Heritage Crafts has unearthed more traditional craft skills on the verge of extinction in the UK, in the latest major update of its pioneering project, the Red List of Endangered Crafts.

Oliver Hymans

Oliver Hymans marionette maker

The research, which has been funded by The Pilgrim Trust with additional sponsorship from The Royal Mint, has found that the energy crisis and inflation has only exacerbated the issues faced by our most at-risk skills, building on the cumulative effect of COVID-19, continuing uncertainties around Brexit and structural issues relating to the funding for skills transmission.

Five new crafts have been added to the ‘critically endangered’ category of the Red List, meaning that they are at serious risk of dying out in the next generation, including straw hat making and encaustic tile making. They join the list of 146 at-risk crafts, including six that have been reclassified as being in greater danger than when the research was last updated in 2021, such as violin bow making and hat block making.

Critically endangered crafts include those with very few practitioners, few (if any) trainees and a lack of viable training routes by which the skills can be passed on. Often they serve very niche markets, and craftspeople cannot afford to step away from production to train their successors for fear those markets will disappear. New crafts in the ‘endangered’ category include Cornish hedging, marionette making and pigment making.

English Antique Glass Ltd

English Antique Glass Ltd

One craft has become extinct in the UK since the publication of the last edition. Mouth-blown flat glass was produced by English Antique Glass in Birmingham until 2022, at which point they were forced to stop production as a result of pressures to reduce their workshop space. This is one of the reasons that the making and restoration of historic stained glass windows has also been added to the Red List, demonstrating the knock-on effect losing one craft can have on others.

It’s not all bad news, however, as some crafts, such as brilliant cutting and shinty stick making, have seen an upturn in their fortunes and moved out of the ‘critically endangered’ category. In many cases this has been as a result of a new-found appreciation of the handmade and the need to support small businesses during the pandemic. In others it has been due to direct support from Heritage Crafts, which since the publication of the last edition of the Red List has distributed 57 grants of up to £2,000 each as part of its Endangered Crafts Fund.

Mary Lewis, who led the research on behalf of Heritage Crafts, said:

“The effect of the energy crisis, inflation, COVID-19 and Brexit have been tough on everyone, not least the craftspeople who possess our most fundamental craft skills. We know that heritage craft skills operate like an ecosystem; if we lose one part it can have devastating consequences on other parts of the system. If we allow endangered crafts to disappear then we seriously diminish the opportunities for future generations to create their own sustainable and fulfilling livelihoods and deal with the challenges of the future.”

Whilst the UK has been a world-leader in the preservation of tangible heritage (museum collections, buildings and monuments), it has fallen behind the rest of the world when it comes to the safeguarding of intangible heritage (knowledge, skills and practices). Of 193 UNESCO members, the UK is one of just 12 that have not yet ratified the 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage, and government responsibility for heritage crafts falls in the gap between agencies set up to support arts and heritage.

Jay Blades MBE, Heritage Crafts Co-Chair said:

“When craft skills are in danger of dying out it’s important that we know exactly where to focus our efforts. Over recent years the Red List of Endangered Crafts has made us realise exactly what we are at risk of losing, and has given our team at Heritage Crafts the information we need to direct our support most effectively. As Co-Chair I’m delighted to endorse this 2023 edition as the next step in turning the tide of craft decline.”

Sue Bowers, Director of the Pilgrim Trust, said:

“We are delighted to support the continuing development of the Red List which is so important in tracking the state of heritage crafts in the UK and creating the platform for discussions about how we can bring about positive change in the future.”

Paul Morgan, The King’s Assay Master at The Royal Mint said:

“The Royal Mint is proud to celebrate, protect and champion British craftsmanship, and we see supporting Heritage Crafts and the Red List of Endangered Crafts as an essential part in this. With precious metals crafts, such as hand engraving and coppersmithing, featuring on this years endangered list, we feel passionately that these skills cannot die out, so by supporting Heritage Crafts and their Red List, alongside recently awarding five bursaries to those working in the fields, we can not only help to preserve these skills in order to ensure the longevity of these crafts for the future, but to really celebrate the talented craftsmen and women behind them.”

The Red List of Endangered Crafts 2023 edition is available to view online. There is also an accompanying print publication sponsored by The Royal Mint.

 

About the Red List of Endangered Crafts

Red List 2023 coverThe 2023 edition of the Red List of Endangered Crafts was led by Mary Lewis, Heritage Crafts’ Endangered Crafts Manager, supported by the Pilgrim Trust. The project runs alongside Mary’s work in identifying and developing interventions to improve the prospects of such crafts, funded by Swire Charitable Trust and others.

For the 2023 edition, 259 crafts have been assessed to identify those which are at greatest risk of disappearing. Of the 146 crafts featured on the Red List, 62 have been classified as critically endangered and 84 as endangered. The remaining 112 are classed as currently viable.

For the purposes of this research, a heritage craft is defined as “a practice which employs manual dexterity and skill at the point of production, an understanding of traditional materials, design and techniques, and which has been practised for two or more successive generations.” The research focuses on craft practices which are taking place in the UK today, including crafts which have originated elsewhere.

Drawing on information such as the current number of craftspeople and trainees, the average age of practitioners, opportunities to learn, and other issues affecting the future of the crafts, including the impact of the energy crisis, the research assesses how likely it is that the craft skills will be passed on to the next generation. From armour making and arrowsmithing to wig making and woodturning, each has been assigned to one of four categories: extinct, critically endangered, endangered or currently viable.

One craft (mouth blown flat glass making) is known to have become extinct in the UK since the publication of the 2021 edition, adding to four more in the last fifteen years (cricket ball making, gold beating, lacrosse stick making, and paper mould and deckle making), with one more (sieve and riddle making) brought back from extinction. At the other end of the spectrum, viable crafts are defined as those for which there are sufficient craftspeople to pass on the craft skills to the next generation, though crafts in the currently viable category face real challenges and require continued monitoring.

The original 2017 Red List, funded by The Radcliffe Trust and led by Greta Bertram, was the first to rank traditional crafts by the likelihood they would survive the next generation, bringing the plight of these skills to national attention.

 

New crafts for 2023

New critically endangered crafts

Crafts classified as ‘critically endangered’ are those at serious risk of no longer being practised in the UK. They may include crafts with a shrinking base of craftspeople, crafts with limited training opportunities, crafts with low financial viability, or crafts where there is no mechanism to pass on the skills and knowledge.

  • Arrowsmithing (reclassified from 2021)
  • Bow making (musical, reclassified from 2021)
  • Chain making
  • Coppersmithing (reclassified from 2021)
  • Encaustic tile making
  • Hat block making (reclassified from 2021)
  • Plume making
  • Silk ribbon making
  • Straw hat making
  • Sussex trug making (reclassified from 2021)
  • Whip making (reclassified from 2021)

New endangered crafts

Crafts classified as ‘endangered’ are those which currently have sufficient craftspeople to transmit the craft skills to the next generation, but for which there are serious concerns about their ongoing viability. This may include crafts with a shrinking market share, an ageing demographic or crafts with a declining number of practitioners.

  • Bicycle frame making (reclassified from 2021)
  • Boat building (traditional wooden boats, reclassified from 2021)
  • Canal art and barge painting
  • Composition picture frame making
  • Cornish hedging
  • Fairground art
  • Gauged brickwork
  • Graining and marbling
  • Hand engraving (reclassified from 2021)
  • Hand hewing
  • Lacquerwork
  • Marionette making
  • Mechanical organ making
  • Pigment making
  • Sgian dubh making
  • Silk weaving
  • Spar making
  • Stained glass window making (historic)
  • Vardo art and living waggon crafts

 

About the Endangered Crafts Fund

Heritage Crafts’ Endangered Crafts Fund was set up in 2019 to ensure that the most at-risk heritage crafts within the UK are given the support they need to thrive. The Fund is used to support makers and trainees who wish to develop or share their skills in the crafts that have been identified as being most at risk.

To date, 57 projects have been funded with support from the Pilgrim Trust, the Radcliffe Trust, the Dulverton Trust, Swire Charitable Trust, Sussex Heritage Trust, Allchurches Trust and Garfield Weston Foundation. Anyone wishing to donate to the fund may do so securely online via the web link below. Alternatively, please send a cheque made payable to ‘The Heritage Crafts Association’ with an accompanying note specifying ‘Endangered Crafts Fund’ to: Heritage Crafts, 27 South Road, Oundle, Peterborough PE8 4BU.

 

About Heritage Crafts

Founded in 2009, Heritage Crafts is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) registered as the ‘Heritage Crafts Association’, the advocacy body for traditional heritage crafts. Working in partnership with government and key agencies, it provides a focus for craftspeople, groups, societies and guilds, as well as individuals who care about the loss of traditional crafts skills, and works towards a healthy and sustainable framework for the future. Its aim is to support and promote heritage crafts as a fundamental part of our living heritage.

 

About the Pilgrim Trust

The Pilgrim Trust is an independent grantmaking trust that supports the urgent and future needs of the UK. It gives approximately £3 million in grants per year to charities and other public bodies that either focus on preserving the UK’s heritage or catalysing social change. Its preservation and scholarship fund aims to preserve the fabric of historically important buildings and to conserve significant collections and artefacts. It wants present and future generations to enjoy the rich and diverse heritage found throughout the UK.

 

About The Royal Mint

The Royal Mint’s expertise in precious metals spans over a thousand years. Known as the home of precious metals in the UK, The Royal Mint offer products including gold, silver and platinum commemorative coins, bars for investment, and a digital gold saving option, backed by metal held in their vault. Last year they announced plans to build a factory to recover precious metals from electronic waste, currently active at lab level. Recovered metal is being used to create beautiful jewellery pieces in their latest business venture, 886 by The Royal Mint.

The HCA Red List of Endangered Crafts at Fortnum & Mason

The HCA Red List of Endangered Crafts at Fortnum & Mason

Where: Fortnum & Mason, 181 Piccadilly, London W1A 1ER
Displays: 4 to 10 October 2021
Demonstrations: 8 October 2021, 12 to 5pm

We are delighted to be partnering with Fortnum & Mason for a focus on endangered crafts and the HCA Red List throughout London Craft Week. Throughout the week, take in displays of information and photographs at the flagship Piccadilly store, and from midday on Friday 8 October watch demonstrations from endangered craft practitioners such as scissor making, bee skep making and basketwork furniture making.

In attendance is Ernest Wright scissor makers, the winners of the inaugural HCA President’s Award for Endangered Crafts, shortlisted by a panel that included Fortnum & Mason Chair Kate Hobhouse and selected by HCA President HRH The Prince of Wales.

Come along and find out more about endangered crafts and what you can do to help safeguard them.