Traditional crafts mapping project, are you on the map?

The Heritage Crafts Association have launched a map of traditional craftspeople in the UK. This great map allows you to zoom in to your county or area and follow links to websites or get contact details of interesting traditional craftspeople to visit or commission. If you are a traditional craftsperson and not on the map yet you can input your details for free here it is incredibly easy and takes just a few seconds. This is what the map looks like today, we are short on pins in Scotland, Wales and NI so please encourage folk from there to sign in.

If anyone has blogs or forums where they could publicise this map that would be helpful, the more people that are on there the more useful it will be to folk using it. Back in 1993 Henrietta Green published her “food lovers guide” locally produced artisan food was still a bit alternative back then though undergoing a resurgence. I used to use the guide (and still do actually) when on holiday to locate interesting food producers taking the extra effort to make good regional produce. Traditional craftspeople have been hard to locate but I believe we are on the tip of that major resurgence just as food was in the early 90’s. Now is the time to get the map fully populated with all the interesting craftspeople out there. If you know someone who you think should be on the map but isn’t send HCA their email and we will invite them or maybe you could send them a link to the map sign up page.

When I visit Sweden it is easy to locate traditional craftspeople because each county has a craft consultant who is responsible for promoting crafts, they know everybody and can suggest folk that a visitor would be interested to see. Our map we hope will be equally useful to tourists looking for something unusual to take home or to craft lovers wishing to source good locally produced work.

The map is the brainchild and hard voluntary work of Daniel Carpenter who runs the HCA website, as with everything HCA do it is done by craftspeople for craftspeople and it costs you nothing so please help support. Oh and if you want a special red pin rather than a blue one to show that you are a friend of HCA then you can sign up here, that costs just £12 per year, you get your name on the website alongside such eminent craftspeople as Owen Jones, Guy Mallinson and Tom Perkins and the good feeling that you are helping make a difference.