The revival of the blacksmith’s craft — a new generation goes at it hammer and tongs

At Intelligent Life, the Economist magazine where I worked for some years, it was easy to feel intellectually challenged. Even the interns all seemed to have Oxbridge Firsts. What a breath of fresh air, then, when the deputy editor’s son decided he didn’t want to go to university, and would instead apprentice as a blacksmith.

During the industrial revolution, Alex Pole tells us in this eccentric and enchanting book, there were 25,000 smiths working in the UK. Now, there are fewer than 2,000. As Ronald Blythe noted more than 50 years ago in Akenfield, far more villages have a cottage called The Olde Forge than a blacksmith. But numbers are creeping up, and the Clerk at the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths reckons that today there are around 500 young people — men and women — in training. Pole believes that modern technology bolsters tradition: blacksmiths use social media to promote their crafts and sell their products, while at the same time the hurtle of modern life encourages a return to slower, older ways. ‘Could it be that we are enjoying the best of both worlds now?’ Certainly his forge on the Somerset-Dorset border is ringing with industry.

This handsome olive green, clothbound volume — a sort of blacksmith’s commonplace book — is lavishly illustrated with drawings and photographs. The smith’s hammer, Pole writes, ‘is essentially an extension of his arms and his thoughts’, and his own tools laid out for the camera look as if they might have belonged to Wayland, the Anglo-Saxon master smith and lord of the elves. A stunning, Farrow & Ball-type chart shows how steel in a forge progresses from dark red (600º C) through shades of cherry and orange to white (1,200º C). And between illustrations Pole writes of his craft in prose that is conversational and compelling, drawing on a marvellous lexicon: bloomer, clinker, scarfing, swages, wootz.