All-Party Parliamentary Group for Craft | Members | Agendas, minutes and papers
To enhance the understanding and promotion of craft in the UK and to ensure that craft skills are supported and passed on to future generations.
Fleur Oakes and Prof Roger Kneebone at the APPG for Craft, 16 October 2018
The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Craft is a new cross-party group set up to enhance the understanding and promotion of craft in the UK and to ensure that craft skills are supported and passed on to future generations.
The aim is for the APPG to encompass as many aspects of craft as is possible so that it provides a collective sounding board and voice for craft – letting those in parliament know about the successes and also the challenges, and also to work together and provide solutions to some of the challenges.
The APPG is Chaired by the Rt Hon John Hayes MP, with Sharon Hodgson MP, Sir Michael Fallon MP, Baroness Garden, Lord Cormack and the Earl of Clancarty as Vice-Chairs. It meets in Westminster once per parliamentary term, with the secretariat provided by the Heritage Crafts Association.
“When it first appeared in Old English, the word craft signified an indefinable sense of knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness. Rediscovering craft will connect us with our human past, our sense of place, and our remarkable capacity to survive in the harshest of landscapes. Craeft helps us more fully appreciate human ingenuity and the passing on of traditions from generation to generation.”
Alex Langlands, Cræft
Forging a future for glassblowing
From Chemistry World, reproduced with permission.
Glass ceilings
Terri Adams became a glassblower after becoming fascinated by a glassware display
Terri Adams from the University of Oxford, UK, ‘stumbled’ into scientific glassblowing. She was touring the University of Bristol’s chemistry department while waiting to take up a job in forensic science. ‘I had never seen anything like the complexity of the glassware items which were on display, let alone given a thought to how they’d been designed and made or by whom,’ she recalls. ‘I was completely captivated and spent a significant amount of time talking to the glassblower at the display.’ She then saw an advert for a trainee scientific glassblowing technician at Bristol and applied for the role. ‘The rest, as they say, is history.’