I absolutely loved this book. A fascinating insight into dying crafts that once shaped Britain and which still leave traces of their existence everywhere. This is not a sentimental hymn to the past though. It offers insights into how we might incorporate craftsmanship into a more sustainable future and build skills back into local communities. One of my top books of 2025.

Highlighting Britain’s fading crafts and celebrating the skills and creativity handed down through generations as living legacies. James Fox’s beautifully written pilgrimage features wheelwrights, bell-founders, rush weavers and coopers to name just a few. Showcasing some lovely print work illustrations, it is easy to delve into at any time without having to read it cover to cover. An inspiring read to remind us why such work matters. I would like to thank the publisher for supplying me with a copy of ‘Craftland’ in exchange for an honest review.

What a beautiful book! James Fox is an art historian from the University of Cambridge and here travels all around the UK to meet the dedicated craftspeople who are continuing the nation’s traditional arts and trades, from the dry stone wallers to the bellfounders, the watch makers and many more. Many of them are the last experts in their field and all are passionate about passing on their knowledge. It sounds like it could be a dry topic but it’s anything but. The writing is engaging and there’s a wonderful balance between the descriptions of the crafts themselves and the people who carry them out. Everything comes alive and there are many moments that are genuinely inspiring and emotional. Although the items produced are obviously more expensive than their mass-produced counterparts, you can absolutely see why and why the product is also far more likely to last. The levels of expertise required are astonishing and really made me feel we should do far more in terms of apprenticeships to ensure the knowledge and skills are not lost. Fox himself is a wonderful guide through it all. His writing is beautiful and his reactions to what he finds very genuine, so it becomes personal rather than just descriptive of the crafts themselves. I really can’t recommend this book highly enough, it’s most definitely going to be one of my books of the year and an absolute treasure.

I'm a sucker for books on traditional crafts (I especially like learning about hedge laying and stone walling) so I was always going to enjoy this book, but I honestly found it so lovely. The expected crafts are there - stone walling, coopering, bellfounding - but it was the slightly more unusual ones that really got me. Did you know how difficult it is to make scissors? I didn't! And did you know a bodger makes (among other things) the spindles for tables and chairs? Again, I did not. (Bodger, to me, can only be followed by "and badger"...) Some of the crafts that James Fox went in search of practitions for are so rare that only a few people practice them now, and in a few cases the last practitioners died literally days before he was due to meet them. And yet these people continue to exist, creating wonderful, beautiful, *useful* things by hand, adamant that in this day and age that really and truly matters. And while I believed that before reading this, I believe it even more afterwards.

James Fox takes us along with him as he looks into the last practitioners of crafts which have been succeeded on the whole by the modern world. In the process he finds much of value. From Stonewalling to wheelwrights, this is a very entertainingly written book with a narrative style that will appeal to people with an interest in history and the crafts themselves. The chapter on the art of letter cutting was eye opening into the process of training an apprentice. The author takes his time to introduce the reader to the craft people and put a human face to each craft. It is an insightful treatment of a fascinating subject. Thank you to the publisher for a review copy of this book.