Gail McGarva will be speaking at the Heritage Crafts Association spring conference at the V&A in March and the next few blog posts will be profiling some of the excellent speakers you’ll get a chance to hear if you are coming and to whet the appetite of those who are yet to book. I blogged about Gail’s work with the…
A nice start to the year, an article from the NFU countryside magazine click on the image for an image that is hopefully big enough to read.
2011 may look like being a year of austerity but for the traditional crafts it may prove to be the most exciting year for a long time. I believe this year will see an explosion of traditional crafts in the media and by the end of 2011 the profile and status of traditional craftspeople will be raised and their skills…
The Heritage Crafts Association year in brief – 2010 2010 has been a fantastic year for traditional crafts and for the Heritage Crafts Association in particular. We would like to thank you for your support and share a few of the highlights. We started the year with the prediction on our blog that 2010 would be the year that traditional…
This is Standard Quay in Faversham It remains a working quay and home to historic craft particularly Thames sailing barges. The fabric of main wetherboarded building is listed for it’s historic value, the grazing marsh around is protected as a RAMSAR site but the crafts and trades which have centuries of unbroken history are not recognised in the same way…
Yesterday it was off to Westminster to meet John Penrose the minister for Heritage to discuss traditional crafts. Ministerial diaries are busy and it is not easy to get a meeting at this level and when you do you rarely know how long you will get beforehand, it can be anything from 20 minutes to rarely as much as an…
HCA committee are incredibly hard working and achieving a lot but much of what we do isn’t stuff that is easy to put out in the public domain. I do a chairs report before each committee meeting and thought it might be interesting for our supporters to see these too. I’ll copy the last two here in the hope that…
Here are a few quotes from an important speech given the the Royal College of the Arts yesterday, I am so excited by it, much of it could be the Heritage Crafts Association manifesto, our message is clearly getting through. “Show me a society where everyone has the opportunity and the desire to seek out new knowledge and new skills…
The life of a craftsman often leaves little distinction between work and play, certainly there are less “days off” than those in full time employment but the work is very rewarding. So this was my weekend. Saturday was a suit day, a trip to London to chair the Heritage Crafts Association committee meeting. Our committee have been working incredibly hard…
Sheffield is famous across the world for steel, cutlery and metal trades. Steel was first mass produced here using the crucible process and stainless steel first made into cutlery here in 1913. Times move on however, the majority of that kind of manufacturing moved out to China and Sheffield Council have successfully invested in rebranding the city “Creative Sheffield“ English…
