Elemental Resonance
The bumpy farmyard track reaches a concrete and corrugated-tin-clad outbuilding marked simply by its large, oxidising sign: The Forge. Behind it, sheep laze and graze amongst Somerset cider orchards while inside Alex, with his baritone voice and calm grin, is making cups of tea and chatting over a chorus of hammers and fiery heat. Qualities of his story, as his blacksmithing trade, possess enchanting contradictions: ancient and renaissance, rough-hewn and gently refined, steely yet amenable, specific yet timeless; it is a story of lost and found traditions and of life’s simplest and greatest pleasures.
Words below by Alex.
“It was a reflection of the days when I made jewellery. Kitchenware is much finer, detailed, smaller-scale work.”
I made a decision six years ago. I remember it very clearly. It was March, a Wednesday, at about four o’clock in the afternoon. I went, Sod this. I am only going to make what I want to make. Everyone thought I was mad. My accountant said to me, “You have just wiped out 80 percent of your business overnight.”
I used to make a lot of different things. Sculpture, furniture, curtain poles, repair works, welding, fire companion sets, lighting, candlesticks — anything to get business, really. I had such a vast range it became very stressful. Then I was in the workshop making something for the kitchen one day, when I realised that I loved doing this. It was a reflection of the days when I made jewellery. Kitchenware is much finer, detailed, smaller-scale work. I went, Right. I am just going to make kitchenware. And I totally changed the business. I don’t do commission work anymore. We vary our work from project to project and we now have a policy to make only the products we enjoy making. 80/20 kind of balance. If a product ever becomes annoying, if we really hate making it, we stop making it. We were making thousands of pounds from wooden door stops with iron handles for instance; they had become one of my most successful products. I used to freight them to Germany by the pallet-load. Good product. Couldn’t stand making them anymore. So we stopped. It took a couple of years to finish up with my clients and it took another four years to build the business back up, but what we are now is great. We are the only traditionally hand-forged kitchenware business in the country.
It is super niche, in a way, and yet kitchenware has such a broad range. I think you have to enjoy what you do on an daily basis otherwise what is the point. It is all very focused now, and this has made the business so much more successful.
There would have been over 25,000 smithies across England at one point, one for every few villages or so. Now there are just a few other companies left like mine who specialise in traditional forge work. Historically blacksmiths were based in rural areas or on small industrial sites. They need to be based out in the sticks because of the noise, but even here at The Forge we have just had a year’s worth of battles with the neighbours and the council to be able to work on this site. The other option was to go to an industrial estate but we wouldn’t be able to teach, or do what we are doing, on an industrial estate. There is not much go-between.
It surprised me, the way people in the village went about to try and close down the business, to make formal complaints to the council. I was surprised because no one came to speak to me about their issues. I didn't receive any complaints myself, so I didn’t know. They made a formal complaint and I was given 28 days by the council to reapply for formal permission to work. On the other side, what was a fantastic surprise is the amount of support I learned about, how nice all the other letters were (written to the council, they did not come to me) saying, “No, we want the business to stay here,” and “Okay, sometimes it’s a bit noisy but we all have to live together.” We do still get some village whisperings about the noise but there is also fantastic support.
Historically the forge and the pub would have been next door to each other. I don’t know what that says about blacksmiths! But those two would have been the heart of the village. The pub was your meeting place and the forge was where you got everything made — all your farming equipment, all your repairs. This meant that smiths didn’t need to go out to find work; but you can’t exist like that anymore. Gone are the days of being in your forge and people coming to you. I have had to go out and find the market. On average, I spend three months of the year travelling to different markets, festivals, and countries to sell or to teach. I do festivals in Wales and Cornwall, we spent a week in Norway last summer, and we travelled to the States at the end of last year. Luckily for me I happen to like that; I like standing behind a market stall for a day, selling my wares. You have to look at your own character and what you are good at, then you need to hunt for your work and create your own market. Not everyone likes selling like this but it works for me at the moment.
“Japanese sword-making is, in effect, the same as American nail-making, is the same as Australian farm repairs. The foundations are all the same.”
I was born in Reading but I didn’t live there for very long. We have lived in a lot of different places — my mum, brother, and I. Our mum used to work in the fashion world when she was younger, as a model, before she got into jewellery-making. I think what started me on this path was her making stuff — watching what she made and seeing all the tools and different metals.
We moved lots, both in the country and the city, but I feel more at home in the countryside. If I never visited a city again I would be quite happy. I used to go into London occasionally for meetings and shows but there are too many people! As soon as I pull into Waterloo Station I start to get quite anxious. Even though I was brought up there, it’s not really my cup of tea. A lot of people say, “You have to go to London to make the money,” but I stopped doing shows down there and we are doing just as well (better in fact). It might take a bit longer, but I really don’t think you need to make a living in the city anymore.
I worked on my own for many years but as things became busier I decided to take on some help. Now there are five of us: Joe is my head smith and production manager; Steve works on production and is my teaching assistant, but is also our resident tech wiz and makes the YouTube films (they have both been with me for around five years); Jimmy is our new production smith and is being trained by Joe; and we also have young Charlie now, our very talented apprentice.
We have two separate workshops: one for production and one for teaching — although all the teaching has been put on hold until the pandemic restrictions have been lifted.
On the production side we use gas forges and mechanical power hammers as well as older equipment like the fly press. We fuse old and new, but overall it’s a modern style. The workshop itself is kept very tidy and organised, all the tools are lined out for efficiency and everything has a place, but we are not machines. We are people and so will never achieve 100% efficiency even if we try, and we want to work in a nice way so we don’t burn out (or try not to anyway!). Sure, there are certain processes we want to tweak, like the kiln we just bought for seasoning pans and skillets — it will be able to take two dozen blanks (as opposed to three or four currently) at a time and hopefully it will get them all the same colour and temperature. But there is always a balance between getting more machines or processes to make life easier and keeping the heart of what we do — hand made by a person, with all it’s faults and differences. It’s these bits that make our products exciting and desirable.
We also make kitchen knives and axes — it’s all part of a wider story for the business. Axes for chopping wood, wood for lighting the fire, fire for cooking, cooking with a chef’s knife to prepare a meal… We usually take traditional European knife shapes and put our own twist on it, finding that balance between function and aesthetics. That is the key difference between kitchenware and jewellery. Jewellery was all about looking nice and relatively little function; now, everything I make for the kitchen has a function. None of what I do is non-functional. Simplicity, texture, function.
I fight with myself to keep the business small so it’s controllable. For instance, while we were making frying pan prototypes and hadn’t even launched the range yet, many people were already saying to us, “We will sell this if you want to do a larger volume.” We are not geared to make a huge volume so we are trying to work it out. (We have since launched the frying pans and they are our biggest seller! We seem to have created a monster, because the next question will be, “Can you make sauce pans? And…” You could have an entire business just doing that.)
The main problem with selling to shops is that all the finishes have to be uniform. For instance, these frying pans are all pre-seasoned, and they can go a dark grey, or blues, or golds. They are the same material, they all go through the same process, but they each come out slightly differently. A shop does not want six different coloured pans, so we are trying to work this out now.
When I take stuff to market some of it can be slightly smaller, others a bit bigger, and that is what people like! We have made a style out of not having everything the same and perfect. I tried to be a machine for years. Must make the same things, must look the same. I had a wholesale business and it drove me nuts, because you cannot exactly replicate a hand-forged product, and that is why I love street and festival trading. And if I am heading up to Frome I travel up the old Fosse Road, which has been a trading route since the Bronze Age, the sun is rising — this is the romantic view of it, most of the time it’s bloody wet and cold, I am tired, but on good days — I get there, I put my wares out, and people buy them! For us, that is extraordinary. It’s an incredible privilege to spend the days making stuff like we do, then for people to appreciate what we are doing and to give us money for it. I mean. It’s crazy!
Joe and I work together on new prototypes. I usually draw a sketch on the back of a shopping list or a scrap of paper, I might also send some pictures, like a mood board. He then makes it how he thinks is right, and I might come back and say move that a little bit, adjust that there. Then Steve will take a look and point something out or suggest to try something different. It’s really more of a collective than anything else. Everyone has a voice — yes, I make the final decisions but I listen to the others (and I am certainly not always right!). There are no sketchbooks. I get a piece of chalk and we draw it on the floor. You can transfer a two-dimensional sketch into a three-dimensional piece of steel but halfway through you might discover something new, so you take it in another direction — like the design of our handles on our frying pans, which came partly from a mistake.
It makes you excited about the process. If it’s all drawn and perfect — some people like working that, don’t get me wrong, that is fine — but for us, we just get a piece of metal and make a sample, then another one, then another one, until we can say, "That’s the one we want to go with.” A lot of what we do is to work by instinct. We don’t really know what we are doing to be honest, because there is no rule book. We are equipped with a set of basic techniques (there are only seven or eight traditional blacksmithing techniques) which we use as building blocks, and we have to play around with them until it looks (and feels) right.
“This rise of interest in traditional crafts… it’s an antidote to modern life. I don’t think it’s a backlash; it’s not a rejection of contemporary living.”
Teaching became so popular I decided to invest in a dedicated teaching space. Although this is a new side of the business, we are now one of the leading independent teaching facilities in the country, slightly be default. We didn’t mean to be. What I mean is, we are not a government-funded organisation like a college (although we are slightly better equipped than some of the colleges).
This rise of interest in traditional crafts — I always say it’s an antidote to modern life. I don’t think it’s a backlash. It’s not a rejection of contemporary living. We use modern machinery here and I think it’s really good for societies to have modern tools. It’s a counterpoint, really. A lot of people work in front of screens, they go home from work to sit in front of screens, they eat in front of screens. There is this massive need, a kind of hunger, for people to get their hands dirty. It goes with the organic movement, the whole foods scene, buying local, limiting imports. All of these are a part of a much bigger circle.
The teaching workshop is the more traditional side, set up for eight students. We use coal, not gas. We had a student in here recently for a knife-making course and because he had previously worked with a gas forge and power hammer, he got here feeling pretty confident before realising, “Shit. You do it the old school way.” (laughs) We use gas for production because we know how to use the older tools. We have done our time. That is really important. You can trace the exact same techniques we taught last weekend to almost 3,000 years ago. Maybe it’s a very romantic view of it, but I have a good friend and mentor in Sweden, Fredrik, who after each class will say, “Right, now we are all linked in this chain that stretches into history.” So when we have eight students here, those are eight new links. It doesn’t mean they are all going to become blacksmiths, but they do have that direct connection to what their ancestors were doing thousands of years ago. Now we use electricity instead of bellows and the anvils have changed shape a little bit, but to manipulate steel you need to get it to a certain temperature and to hit it with something hard — that has not changed. So while we are very, very up on health and safety, if you want a taste of what life is like as a blacksmith: It does get smokey in here and there are fumes and dust and it gets insanely hot when all eight forges are burning. It’s tiring and students do get blisters and burns. It’s quite an intense experience. But the fact that, at the end of the day, these people covered in soot can have a shower out back, pop into their tent to change their clothes, then come and sit down for dinner with a beer and really nice food — now that is a great day.
I teach in a more formal, structured sense. Many students ask, “Can I make this? Can I make that?” But I have to say, “Sorry. You can book a private class if you want to do that,” because to teach eight different people eight different things will be immensely complicated.
We have a beginners’ course, a series of knife-making courses, and a series of axe-making courses. Predominantly people want to make axes these days, it has become our most popular course. It used to be knives, always, and we couldn’t sell the axe courses. This is very much linked to the bushcraft, survivalist, camping-outdoors scene. We had eight guys here last summer who spent two days making an axe and a third day outside where they learned how to use the axe, how to make mallets and tent pegs, how to break down a log so you can light a fire with one match, steel striker, or ferro rod. Our students can be extremely diverse: we have had a brain surgeon, a builder, an ex-greengrocer, a guy who runs a charity arts program, CEOs of tech companies, local farmers from down the road, carpenters. A lot of retirees. In one of our classes four of them were rock climbers (they didn’t know each other)!
“I am increasingly interested in utensils; these things that people use everyday and what these objects mean to them.”
Food is my other passion. I am increasingly interested in utensils; these things that people use everyday and what these objects mean to them. I also happen to like eating and drinking, a lot. I like going to restaurants, I like cooking. Look at the size of me! So now we are bridging the gap between the produce and what the produce is cooked in and with; to make that link between craft and cooking, between making a tool with how you use it. We have begun to align ourselves with chefs. I want to develop a knife-making course where you can learn how to make a chef’s knife, then a chef will come in and show you how to use it properly.
We have also recently self-published a cookbook, The Forge Kitchen, which is a collaboration between myself and 21 other chefs and food producers (including Anja Dunk, DJ BBQ, Emily Watkins, Gill Meller, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mark Hix, Olia Hercules, Thomasina Miers and more). It is full of amazing recipes, utensils, fire, and history. Every recipe starts with a piece of kitchenware first, then the ingredients second. It has been a fantastic project to work on over the past two years. Self-publishing is daunting; it’s not cheap to produce a beautiful book, so now there is the hard job of selling it! Fingers crossed people will like what we have done.
We are very cyclical. Blacksmithing traditions are the same all around the world, to some degree. Japanese sword-making is, in effect, the same as American nail-making, is the same as Australian farm repairs. The foundations are all the same because it’s all the same material. The only unique thing about blacksmithing in the UK is that it’s non-continuous tradition. Blacksmithing nearly died out in Britain in the 1950s, so traditions are still being relearned. There were the wars, industrialisation, mechanisation. Because so many men died in the wars, especially in Western Europe, so many skills were lost, families were wiped out and they were often the only ways of passing on that tradition. Today we seem to be learning back these traditions from other places like Scandinavia. We visited the Czech Republic last year and that is a very continuous tradition. The American tradition is also slightly different in that it started much later with colonisation. But it’s much more of a stylistic difference that defines Czech or British or American blacksmithing, rather than tradition or technique. We hope to bring in smiths from other countries in the near future, to come and stay for a week, to teach a course in a particular style.
“The community is much bigger now. It is a totally, totally different world.”
What has changed is social media. For almost fifteen years I worked in total isolation, 60 hours a week. Market days were a welcome break. If I found a book that gave me one clue about a new technique or trick, I would be like, “This is great!” There was no internet, there was no way of discovery. For those of us who were young and interested in experimenting with traditional techniques, we didn’t know what we were doing so we grabbed any technique we possibly came across. The community is so much bigger now. It is a totally, totally different world. Many people complain about social media, Google, the internet, but these technologies are also incredibly valuable.
One of my mentors, who has been a blacksmith for over six decades, was sitting here having a cup of tea with me several years ago, asking me, “How do you deal with the isolation?” I said to him, “Well, there’s this new thing called Instagram.” (laughs) I run a lot of my business through Instagram. You can’t chat much on there but you can go, Oh there’s this guy in Canada doing some amazing stuff. Wow! And, Shit there are some people over here and God! There is this guy down the road and there’s another one! It suddenly became this whole new community and that is the really positive side of something like Instagram. Of course, there is a downside. Some people make stuff just for Instagram, and that’s a different side of it. But I think for genuine craftspeople it has been amazing. For the first time we are easily communicating with others around the world. I phoned a guy in the States the other day, I have never met him, but I could say to him, “Hey, how’s it going? Have you got a bit of advice on this bit of kit?” Or someone will message me saying, “I’ve recently got this new type of steel, it’s the same as what you use but it cracked when I put it in the water…” So we give each other bits of information.
It is important to have people to talk to, to be able to ask questions, to say, “Have you come across this problem before?” or “I’m really struggling with this bit.” You don’t need formal mentors; it can be another blacksmith who visits occasionally to see your progress. A big mistake I made early on was not talking to people enough. There wasn’t this kind of communication then. Just before I changed the business I told myself, I am giving this up. I had a real loss of faith. I could not do it anymore. I was physically exhausted and mentally utterly drained. I would sit in the workshop for two, three hours staring at the wall going, This is just bollocks. What am I doing this for? Then I had one five-minute conversation with a guy which changed my life. He basically said, “Look, don’t worry about it. Everyone loses faith, everyone goes through this process.” Having that person to talk to — I didn’t even personally know him very well, he is a well-respected blacksmith and teacher, but — it was from that conversation that I realised it’s alright. From that point on, I made choices to go to exhibitions, to go to meetings, to visit Sweden, where I was able to have more conversations with others. Both Joe and Steve found me at festivals. It’s a bit like resetting or rebooting the computer. Allow yourself to go and do that, to get into those positions where you can talk to people. I could have sat here in the workshop, getting more and more depressed, more and more disillusioned in what I was doing, but thankfully I decided to make a change. I, and the business, have been totally different since.
– Since March 2020 –
Everything is quite different now. We have decided to put a hold on all taught courses until restrictions are lifted. (I have chosen not to run the courses to concentrate on production and because our courses are designed to be both technically and socially interacting… not about socially distancing.) So now we use both rooms for producing the kitchenware — we have expanded fourfold in the past six months so it’s lucky we had the extra space.
As we were unable to go to festivals and markets, and stopped running our courses, we lost 95 percent of the business practically overnight. Thankfully 5 percent was still selling through Instagram. We had to be adaptable. I used the first four to five weeks of lockdown to get a new e-commerce website built, then moved everything online. The response has been incredible! Interestingly, the same appreciation for the handmade quality we found at markets is working online for us as well. Our customers understand that not everything will be exactly the same. Yes, sometimes there are imperfections or working marks on a piece, but that simply shows the human element of what we are making.
Now we are selling all over the world (at least 20 percent goes to the US). We have also started a YouTube channel and live IGTV demonstrations as a way of interacting with our followers and customers. If we can’t go out and show people what we do then at least we can bring them to The Forge via social media. It has been great fun and we are planning to carry this on in the future.
Although I do miss some of the travelling and the more personal interactions at markets and festivals, for the business, the necessary changes have been great. The last eight months have been a real eye-opener. It has offered us many new opportunities, time to experiment with new designs, and to build a more solid kitchenware range. Moving forward I think we will naturally be more selective about where we go and what we do. Not in an arrogant way; only more careful with time spent away from home.
Where are you happiest? That’s easy — making things at the forge. (Or in a hot bath at home with a glass of wine. My two favourite places in the world.)
Greatest impact on your work: People. Fredrik Thelin, my adopted master, has had the greatest impact on my work, more so than anyone else. Everything impacts on your work really, that’s how it is with people who make stuff. They absorb everything around them, even if they don’t realise it, and it becomes part of their craft.
I hope the discovery of extraterrestrial life becomes a reality in my lifetime.
Published on: 13 December 2020. Edited by Fields in Fields. Workshop photographs by Fields in Fields, product images courtesy of Alex Pole. ■ For hand-forged kitchenware, recipes, workshop announcements and more, visit: alexpoleironwork.com