Rare Trades; making things by hand in the digital age
Whilst working on Blokes & Sheds I came across a number of shed dwellers who were old tradesmen - sometimes brilliantly (and oh so casually) skilled at their old trade.
What is more disturbing was the fact that some of those old fellows felt that they had never adequately passed their skills on to anyone. Technology may have made their particular skill redundant or there is simply no longer a demand for what they do. These are often trades with an ancient legacy, some with special knowledge, habits, language and tools stretching back to the Middle Ages and beyond.
And they were on the verge of disappearing. The changes that technology had always promised as a glowing bright future had arrived and now these blokes are history. They aren’t happy about it either.
Something doesn’t add up in all of this - and I believe that it relates to the role of our hands, that important sense of feeling useful and capable, and many other microscopic changes to how we live and work that give many people a profound sense of unease.
Rare Trades will concentrate on the old skills and trades to find out what they know and can pass on to future generations. The task is urgent. A number of prime subjects have passed on while I’ve been pondering the vast scale of this project.
The dexterity and sureness, the years of learnt skill that went into some of the tasks they undertook is now a rare thing. It’s now becoming very rare for anybody to use highly developed hand/eye skills at work - flapping away at a computer may be where people work but it does not provide a lot of satisfaction to many people.
We rarely use our hands to make things. The hand, so long an essential part of our development from animal to human, is now being consigned to a secondary role. Our development as a toolmaking and tool using animal was, along with language and communication, one of the things that set us apart from the beasts.
Human hands, capable of making objects of great utility and beauty, are now used to dial phones or press computer keys in the name of work. Work is, for most people, no longer a source of identity: it’s now a generic process - a task you just do between 9 and 5.
We feel our loss keenly. On weekends, hardware stores fill with people fulfilling a deep urge to do something practical and useful. They take home pieces of wood, materials tools and wreck them in an attempt to recover some sense of accomplishment.
Rapid technological change has not obliterated the old trades completely. There are still those around who are part of an unbroken heritage of knowledge and skill, although not for much longer.
Some are the remnant of an old trade for which demand has virtually vanished. Some insist on doing things in an old way just because they don’t like dealing with technology or have no faith in it. Some are trades that did vanish almost completely and have now been recreated as a result of demand. Some are not trades in the strict sense of being a tradesman but more an attitude towards work and finding practical solutions.
Some have turned into crafts which strips away their original functional nature, turning them into “art” (unfortunately)
Along the way, many issues are emerging. Our roots in being a innovative culture, the trend towards being a more indoor, inward looking nation, the fact that young people have little grasp of the power of the lever, the pulley or the wedge. The knowledge that made us great survivors may not be being passed on.
We are also becoming disconnected with physically manipulating the world around us. We may have lost our nerve when it comes to changing the world for our benefit (and there’s plenty of evidence that we’ve made a right stuff-up of it, too).
There’s an increasing neo-Luddism to all this that is rather disturbing.
This project is not an exercise in sentimentality - the “good old days” were often hard, sometimes brutal, badly paid work. Most of the old tradesmen I have spoken to like the fact that power tools and computers can eliminate a lot of boring work and give them time to put their feet up. As one old fellow told me: “Mark, this is all bullshit: do you think anyone gives a stuff about what trade disappeared as a result of the invention of penicillin?”
Behind all these stories are some powerful messages. I should be an interesting and stimulating book that will prove a useful record of an important time in our history.
Some of the people in Rare Trades; making things by hand in the digital age include: patternmakers, coopers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, horologists, bookbinders, stonemasons, shipwrights, sailmakers, sleepercutters, leatherplaiters, watchmakers, shingle cutters, wheelwrights, coachbuilders, dry stonewall builders, the list goes on and on.
I wanted the people whose trade is never quite acknowledged as an “art” yet still has a integral beauty to it that comes from the fact that a highly skilled human made these things with nothing but his or her hands, eyes, brain and some tools.
