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  • Published: 4 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529936094
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $65.00

Craftland

A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades

  • James Fox




A dazzling, soul-stirring journey through the lost and endangered crafts that shaped Britain from multi-award-winning historian and broadcaster James Fox

The story of craft is the story of who we are.

Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our families, communities and regions. Craftland brings to life the vanishing skills, traditions and trades that shaped the fabric and governed the rhythms of everyday life in Britain for hundreds of years.

Through the stories of often humble-seeming objects of exquisite beauty, precision, utility and meaning, it shows how craft connects us to the land, emerging from local natural materials, and is the material expression of our regional identities and cultures. And through encounters with some of the last remaining master craftspeople at work today – weavers and wheelwrights, coopers and coppice-workers, boat-builders and bell-founders, silversmiths and watch-makers – we glimpse not only our past but another way of life, one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could yet shape our future.

For as long as there are humans, there will be craft, ever evolving in response to changing technologies, environments and communities. Craftland is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.

  • Published: 4 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529936094
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $65.00

Praise for Craftland

Craftland is a book that shimmers with love for a dwindling world of meticulous, patient labour … Lyrical … Deftly written and well researched

Guardian

A beautifully crafted book – akin to the beautifully crafted objects it describes … What a treat to discover facts and stories that feed the heart and prove that craft is as ever present as it has forever been

Kate Malone, ceramist

This hugely absorbing book is so full of stories of crafts and craftspeople and communities, and of creativity over the ages. It’s such an important story to tell and told so compellingly. Wonderful

Michael Morpurgo, author of War Horse

Beautiful, eye-opening and surprisingly moving - a treat to treasure

Lucy Worsley, author of Jane Austen at Home

It is so rare to come across a book brimming with fresh news and seasoned with hope. James Fox uncovers a largely hidden history which is still alive all around us today. I read it in two gulps with delight

Andrew Marr, author and journalist

A dazzling combination of evocative prose and meticulous research, Craftland is an impassioned undertaking and novel portrait of the country’s past and how we might rethink our future

Kate Bryan, art historian

This extraordinary book is essential reading. It will leave you awestruck at the complexity and persistence of the crafts that shaped our world, and inspired to engage more deeply with our vanishing material world of objects and skills. Anyone who has ever felt a disconnection from modern life will find themselves irresistibly drawn in

Xand Van Tulleken