Have you seen Heritage Craft's "Red List"?

This year, twenty new crafts were added to Heritage Craft’s red list, with their research (funded by the Pilgrim's Trust) citing that “rising operational costs, a lack of structured training, and mounting market pressures are placing unsustainable strain on crafts that depend on expert hand skills.” The article goes on to state: “without urgent action, many of these heritage craft skills could disappear within a generation”. 

 

It's quite a harrowing call to action – a generation, in the grand scheme of things, really isn’t that long, especially when we consider the many generations so many of these crafts have been alive.

Reading the ‘red list’ has had me thinking about our distant ascendants, hundreds to thousands of years ago, who would have relied on some of the now endangered craft-skills as a means of necessity and survival in their day-to-day lives. Skills would have been passed down from generation to generation, valuable pieces of knowledge that could keep a household running, or skills that could be turned into life-long trades. Whereas for many of us in the modern age, we now turn to craft as form of creative expression and leisure; a break from our own chores and daily necessities. 

 

We’re incredibly lucky to experience craft and creativity in this way - having a creative outlet is nourishing for the soul and calming for the mind; I'm so grateful for the ways in which craft and creativity enrich our lives. We have it infinitely easier than our long-ago ancestors, but I can't deny that in my life, I often feel the lack of the practical, day-to-day craft skills they most likely would have had in their repertoire. (The stack of holey socks waiting for me to learn how to darn them, and the wedge of clay in the workshop waiting to be turned into tiles, agrees).

There are many skills on the red list that, whilst they may no longer be a necessity in our current-day society, are still full of deeply valuable knowledge. Beautifully tactile crafts that connect us with the history and tales of the land and people, and practical, hands-on crafts that could enable us to slide a little further away from the rabid throw-away mind set, and the consumerism that’s increasingly hurting our planet.  

 

In modern society, it’s incredibly easy (too easy?) to get by without having the knowledge or skill to, for example, make our own herbal remedies, or mend our clothes. Many of us are just too short on time, too busy being...busy (which is incidentally one of the reasons we turn to craft and creativity: to slow down).

Maybe we can strive to find a little more balance between our cultural, craft heritage and our present, modern lives, to ensure that we have an array of craft-skills and know-how to continue passing down to the future generations. We can stay curious, and take an interest in the "how" whenever we see something that has been crafted by someone's hands, or ancient stone structures that have weathered thousands of storms and are still standing strong, or when we turn to the internet to buy our clothes and the functional items that fill our homes, that once would have been made by the home-dwellers themselves.

CraftCourses has an absolute abundance of courses to peruse, a portion of which are crafts included in Heritage Craft's red list: endangered, or critically endangered. You'll find a small selection in this week's newsletter HERE, and more HERE, if you've been inspired to support these magnificent artisans in keeping their craft alive.

I think we owe it to our ancestors to do our bit to keep the knowledge thriving for generations to come!