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posted by martyb on Monday August 14 2017, @08:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the craft!=boat dept.

Over at Hackaday is a pointer to The Heritage Crafts Association list of endangered crafts:

The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation and mass production, and today very few of the products you use will be hand-made. There may still be a few craftsmen with the skills to produce them by hand, but in the face of the mass-produced alternative there is little business for them and they are in inevitable decline. In an effort to do something about this and save what skills remain, the Heritage Crafts Association in the UK has published a list of dying crafts, that you can view either alphabetically, or by category of risk.

It’s a list with a British flavour as you might expect from the organisation behind it, after all for example hand stitched cricket balls are not in high demand in the Americas. But it serves also as a catalogue of some fascinating crafts, as well as plenty that will undoubtedly be of interest to Hackaday readers.

Obviously this is UK specific, as many of these crafts survive elsewhere in the world. However the links to individual crafts provide the history, techniques, and further background on each area. The hackaday comment threads also contain some additional suggestions.


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  • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday August 14 2017, @03:03PM (2 children)

    by richtopia (3160) on Monday August 14 2017, @03:03PM (#553695) Homepage Journal

    I wasn't sure what Gold Beating (http://heritagecrafts.org.uk/gold-beating/) was, and it turns out it is hitting gold with a hammer to form thin sheets. It is "extinct" in the list. However, reading the description it states it stopped because of completion from China in this very labour intensive process. So the job still exists, just not in the UK.

    You could argue that some of these skills need to be preserved nationally. However many of them are replaced by cheap labour in other countries or automation, so why defend them? It just means that your country has a higher standard of living than the poor saps who are now performing that job. Congratulations.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday August 14 2017, @03:31PM (1 child)

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday August 14 2017, @03:31PM (#553714) Journal

    We preserve old skills (not necessarily the same thing as defending them) for the same reason we preserve old books & old artefacts and old buildings and old data. It's history, in this case living history. A connection to the past and to one's ancestry, and a chance to learn something from our forebears - even if the lessons are not immediately obvious.

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @04:27PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday August 14 2017, @04:27PM (#553743)

      Who's "we"? Society only preserves old skills as a profession when there's a financial reason to do so. Otherwise, it ends up falling to hobbyists. This list of "dying crafts" isn't really about hobbyists, it's about professionals, bemoaning the fact that many of these are disappearing from the UK. You can't ask people to take up a profession if it's not going to keep them gainfully employed because there's not enough people willing to pay them enough to do it. Society has clearly spoken: it does not value the skills on this list, so it's better if people avoid it as a profession. Leave the old artifacts to museums.