Last call for submissions

Today is the last day that you can submit to the £60,000 Cræft Prize for maverick and misfit makers, creative technologists, industrial designers, and artisan-innovators fusing the deep wisdom of craft with the cutting edge technologies of the future.

The application window will close at midnight.

Applications have been flying in over the last few days and the race is hotting up. The judges are going to have a tricky time selecting six nominees, let alone a winner.

If you are submitting, please be sure to use the application form on the Nation of Artisans website.

If you have any trouble, feel free to email me at louis@nationofartisans.com

If any problems with digital submission, you will NOT be penalised. Just send an email and we will resolve any issues.

Physical submissions

Several applicants have offered to deliver physical artefacts for assessment by the judges — including one brilliant cræftsman who drove several hundred miles to hand deliver their work in a box!

If you would like to do this, email me at louis@nationofartisans.com

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Other key information

If you have yet to submit, be sure to read about the judges.

If you are not sure where your submission fits into the artisanal intelligence / cræft thesis, check this out:

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Thank you!

Though applications are not yet closed, I want to thank each and every person who has submitted to the prize — or indeed shared their support over the past few months. The applications are looking brilliant. While a few months ago I had no idea if the prize would actually produce anything interesting… I am now confident a cræft renaissance awaits!

Be sure to subscribe to watch it unfold…

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In the meantime, stay tuned for a big Nation of Artisans announcement in the coming weeks.

Tick-tock on the clock: the deadline for the Cræft Prize is hurtling towards us. Doors close at midnight of August 31st e.g. no later than one minute past midnight on September 1st

Today I’m sharing a brand new piece that I wrote for UnHerd on the 100th anniversary of the K2 red telephone box. It captures some of the deeper thinking that lurks behind the prize and Nation of Artisans more broadly.

The K2 was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect behind Battersea Power Station and the Tate Modern. Pursuing a philosophy that he called the “middle line” between tradition and modernity, Scott believed that designers needed to embrace cutting-edge aesthetics and manufacturing methods, while also subtly borrowing ideas from the past. This, he believed, would create strong, rooted foundations for the future.

My article explores Scott’s “middle line” philosophy and then goes a step further, asking: in a world where emerging technologies like AI are rupturing our sense of place, how could Scott’s philosophy be applied to design form factors that cultivate roots?

This piece was so fun to write — and very rewarding as I believe it took me one step closer to synthesising my own ideas on the philosophy of aesthetics and technological rupture.

If you’re looking for inspiration for your submission to the Cræft Prize, then look to Scott. If you enjoy or have thoughts on the article then let me know. I hope it will be the first in a series on design that roots the rootless.

The red telephone box can save Britain (and the world)

In the old St Pancras graveyard nestled behind King’s Cross, there is a tomb. Engraved with pineapples and an ouroboros, and crowned with a shallow dome, it is the resting place of Sir John Soane, the brilliant architect who designed the Bank of England headquarters. Soane designed it for his wife Eliza, who is said to have died of heartbreak in 1815 after their son traduced his father in the newspapers, before his own body was laid to rest there alongside hers.

Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the first K2 — or “Kiosk no.2” — was designed by another titan of British architecture, Giles Gilbert Scott. In his submission to a contest run by the Royal Fine Art Commission, Scott wanted to design a kiosk that used tradition to close the cultural rupture created by the telephone and networked modernity. A trustee of the Soane Museum, Scott borrowed the tomb’s distinctive neo-classical dome.

The simple but elegant design, laid atop an industrial glass and iron box, gave birth to a form that is now iconic. Today, it is ubiquitous to Britain’s aesthetic in the national and global imagination. A century later, the society-rupturing technology of the day is artificial intelligence. Thoughtful observers might ask: can we once again create elegant and rooted aesthetic forms that encase cutting-edge technologies in ways that spark joy and connection?

Scott came from a family of great Victorian architects whose work attempted to tame technological upheaval. Techno-industrial revolutionaries had made Britain into the workshop of the world, sowing deep division in the process. Scott’s grandfather George attempted to temper the culture war by dressing modernity in Gothic revivalist architecture with a Christian face. The red brick façade of the hotel at St Pancras Railway Station, near Soane’s Tomb, typifies his approach. The hotel’s elaborate Gothic structure, echoing the cathedrals of yore, was designed as a counterbalance to William Henry Barlow’s epic iron-and-glass railway hall.

Decades later, in contrast to his grandfather’s Gothic shield against modernity, Giles took a different track. In an address to the Royal Institute for British Architects, Scott described his grand architectural theory of a “middle line” between the traditionalists and modernists. He said: “I want to see [Modernism’s] best features and characteristics retained and grafted at first onto the architecture of the past and then gradually developed.”

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Through this “middle line”, the architectural historian Gavin Stamp argues, Scott found a compromise that gave his clients cutting-edge aesthetics while also building with traditional forms and materials to blend into the fabric of the built environment. Another critic, David Frazer Lewis, compares Scott’s philosophy to G.K. Chesterton’s theory that Christianity resolved its furious tensions by allowing “two opposite flames burning brightly”. By creating designs that could be everything at once, Lewis argues, Scott seamlessly synthesised the modern, traditional, abstract, and archaeological into a new vision of the future.

The K2 is the perfect embodiment of Scott’s middle line. The Soane-inspired dome is formed by a vaulted roof cut from a hemisphere. Its four sides are gently ornamented with striking reeded strips above and fluted architraves below. These border a shallow inner patera which houses the “TELEPHONE” sign. The body features a grid of cast iron with rows of small panes of glass — which magically code as both Victorian factory and Georgian sash windows.

Rather than replicate the grandeur of Soane’s neo-classical embellishments, Scott avoided ornament that could be broken off. Instead, he delicately perforated holes in the shape of the King’s crown, simultaneously creating a ventilation system. The red paint, meanwhile, was not Scott’s choice. While he suggested silver with green interiors, the Post Office chose red to align with their post boxes.

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Manufactured at various ironworks across Falkirk and Kirkintilloch, the K2 proliferated around London as demand for telephones skyrocketed. For King George V’s Jubilee in 1935, Scott was recalled to re-design a later iteration, the smaller K6 kiosk. Seeking evolution over revolution, he simplified the detailing and windows further and the K6 spread to the rest of the nation. When Scott died in 1960, there were 60,000 kiosks dotted across the country.

In the century following the K2 boom, the kiosks have been on something of a journey. While the K6, standing a little shorter with a wider central window pane, was a great success, the rise of domestic and then mobile phones gradually rendered them useless. The box’s successors, such as British Telecom’s hideous KX design, were loathed by the public. BT attempted to reimagine them as a “Street Hub” WiFi network, but campaigners are nevertheless trying to root them out of the nation’s pavements.

Yet many of Scott’s kiosks are still in rude health. Nearly three thousand are now listed monuments of national heritage, and many have taken on new lives. They are homes for defibrillators, mini libraries, cafés, public art works, smartphone repair shops, a pub, the world’s smallest nightclub — the possibilities are endless. The dividend for investing in timelessness is a return that compounds through each reinvention.

How has the K2 endured, despite its technological obsolescence? To a more trad-inclined critic, the kiosk’s success is evidence of the Scrutonian adage that if you “put beauty first, what you do will be useful forever. It turns out nothing is more useful than the useless.” Yet the K2 has survived not simply because it’s a pretty red box. Countless other beautiful constructions have failed to stand the test of time.

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There are deeper forces sustaining the K2, even if the kiosk’s power to unite a nation is somewhat paradoxical. The telephone connected the Edwardians to those far away, but it also had the potential to detach them from our physical world, thus beginning the atomisation that has since been accelerated by the mobile phone. Like all technology, the telephone was not a neutral tool. It detached live voice from an in-person body, rendering it instead as sound that could come from any corner of the globe. Suddenly, as if by magic, one was free to connect to others miles away, but also to disconnect from one’s immediate world.

In his 1985 classic No Sense of Place, Joshua Meyrowitz fuses the media theory of Marshall McLuhan with Erving Goffman’s sociology of face-to-face behaviour to explain how electronic media warp our sense of place. Meyrowitz argues that the ancient bond between where you are and how you experience the world is severed by electronic communications. For all of human history, physical place has governed what you knew and how you behaved with those around you. This “situational geography”, as Meyrowitz calls it, dictates the norms and possibilities of a given place. A courtroom makes you behave formally, a pub is convivial, and a church could make you reverent.

Electronic media like telephones do strange things to that experience. Once information can fly in from elsewhere, the physical boundaries that guide behaviour start to melt. With a phone or the internet, one could be in church while also being in a warzone or at a football match. This renders us, Meyrowitz argues, “more informed but less rooted”. Indeed it can happen to a nation as well as an individual. On a grand scale, the complex web of institutions held together by language, custom and print media could start to dissolve.

Rather than accelerate this dissolution, the K2 delayed it. What could have been an avatar of placelessness instead became a shared source of national unity, one that drew on and refashioned a common, recognisable, and rooted vernacular. A century later, wherever one is in Britain, the K2 — along with post boxes, hedgerows, and drystone walls — is the ultimate reminder that one is somewhere, not nowhere.

Today we stand at a similar crossroads. This time it is artificial intelligence that threatens the further erasure of our sense of place. Information is no longer located in just physical (or virtual) paper, books, places, or people. Rather, it now floods out from a chatbot in streams of text seemingly from everywhere and nowhere.

A sceptical public increasingly sees AI as a parasitical amorphous intelligence, poised to strangle them with surveillance, job losses, even techno-apocalypse. Once again, some companies seeking AI proliferation are invoking vague noises about “culture” and “taste” to prime consumers to welcome their technologies.

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Yet, electronic media’s form has shape-shifted in the last century. Mobile computing has pushed physical infrastructure mostly out of sight — though backlash against ugly data centres has sparked the AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, to incentivise architects to dream bigger. His glitzy new data centre design prize might encourage more humane design.

Data centres, of course, are rarely our most direct physical experience of the digital age. The smartphone has become the primary human interface for computing — but that might not last. In June, Paul Graham, the founder of the legendary Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y-Combinator, observed: “No one knows yet what the next form factor for computing will be, and yet there will be a next form factor, and it will seem obvious in retrospect.”

Some candidates are beginning to emerge. Meta is starting with eyeglasses, tapping into fashion culture by borrowing the valour of Ray-Ban and Oakley’s iconic designs and partnering with Kylie Jenner. Buying iconicity may temporarily work, but has borrowed valour ever endured? OpenAI, meanwhile, is betting on earbuds, hiring the iPhone-designing superstar Sir Jony Ive to build Dime. A recent stealth advert suggests the buds will live in a steel case resembling a space-age Anish Kapoor sculpture. In its deliberately futuristic design, the case oozes a familiar, clean rootlessness that may no longer inspire jaded consumers in the way early iPhones did. Meta and OpenAI are big enough companies that their new products will sell well. But whether those products will become timeless is doubtful.

Back in London, the voice AI firm ElevenLabs is taking Scott’s wisdom very literally. Rather than chase modernity, the startup is experimenting with a tried and tested model: the K2 telephone box itself. By training an AI mimicking Sir Michael Caine’s voice, then embedding it in an old-style phone within a replica K2, Eleven Labs has won hearts, minds, and eyeballs. Paying tribute to Scott’s great aesthetic innovation is a welcome act, if not quite the same as doing the painstaking work required to become the true heirs to his “middle line”.

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Instead, it is perhaps a small Swedish design studio that could one day prove Scott’s heir. Founded in 2005, Teenage Engineering makes musical synthesisers. They constantly play with form and function, rooting new devices in culture and history. Their medieval “Instrumentalis Electronicum” weds medieval design to the warm functionalism of Dieter Rams, while the Riddim ‘n’ Ting sampler plays with Jamaican dancehall aesthetics.

The firm has since branched into wooden doll choirs and reinvented the Polaroid. Teenage Engineering’s cult following won them the job of co-designing Rabbit’s R1, a toy-like, AI-native computer styled after Eighties gaming. The R1 flopped, since it arrived too early for the AI boom and its Eighties-style plastic gave the appearance of cheapness. Yet the firm’s restless thirst for combining experimentation with roots shows how one can keep the best of modern design while borrowing the beloved ideas of the past. This could well lead Teenage Engineering to Scott’s promised land.

A hundred years on, the battles over the aesthetics of modern life rage on: glass towers versus Georgian townhouses, tailored versus sprayed-on suits, serif versus sans serif fonts. The argument will never stop. Yet the true heir to Scott will neither pick a side nor lazily approximate a middle ground. The harmony at the heart of the K2 comes from a delicate thoughtfulness, a commitment to crafting something that shields us from the rupturing force of technology, while also rooting us in a shared story. Those roots might come from a local vernacular, or simply from an earlier, less inhumane era of computing. For now, Scott’s throne is there for the taking.

A original version of this piece was published in UnHerd on Saturday 22nd August.

Open Call: The Cræft Prize

Calling all maverick and misfit makers, creative technologists, industrial designers, artisan-engineers of Britain and the wider world. It is time to come together and fuse heritage with the future to spark a new renaissance.

Today, we launch The Cræft Prize, a new national award of £60,000 searching for creative technological and aesthetic inventions.

The twist? This is no ordinary design or innovation competition. We are seeking innovative responses to today’s biggest challenges, inviting inventors to combine the deep wisdom of crafts of the past with cutting-edge technologies of the future.

The competition is designed to inspire a wave of creativity, innovation, and aesthetic magic. It is open to all the merrie people of Britain and beyond, by birth or adoption.

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Why it exists

The Cræft Prize is the brainchild of Nation of Artisans — a project founded by Louis Elton in 2025 to explore Britain through the lens of the strange alchemy of heritage craft, industrial power, and cutting-edge innovation.

Britain is a land of deep craft and creative heritage. It is also a pioneer of some of the world’s most important industrial and technological innovations.

Yet these two traditions have drifted apart. Britain’s craft world is rooted but increasingly fragile, often trapped trying to conserve a way of life whose material foundations have already vanished.

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Meanwhile, our techno-innovation industries are revolutionary, but lacking in soul and meaning, often dissolving the communities and traditions that once enabled harmony and flourishing.

The Cræft Prize exists not to preserve ashes, but to light a new fire.

The prize aspires to incubate radical, practical creations — and a wider ecosystem — that proves heritage and innovation can be dynamic partners. By combining craft knowledge with emerging technology, the prize aims to address Britain’s identity and innovation crisis through a new mode of AI: artisanal intelligence.

On “Cræft” & Technology

“Craft” is a word that invites argument. Is it only handmade? Is it opposed to technology and industry? In popular usage, it often collapses into twee imagery: Etsy sellers and nostalgic handicraft. While we value human-scale making, the Cræft Prize is aimed at something more ambitious.

The name draws on the Anglo-Saxon word “cræft”. Popularised by 9th-century King Alfred, cræft is not just manual skill, but the virtuous application of knowledge and power to produce excellence in a way that binds hand, eye, heart, mind, material, place, and history into a coherent practice. The term was revived by historian Alexander Langlands in his 2018 book Cræft.

Thus, the prize is avowedly pro-technology, but against slop. At its best, technology is about doing more with less, a principle long shared by craft, engineering, and invention.

Following William Morris, we reject technology that produces ugly, soulless, and inhumane things, seeking instead the union of beauty and utility embodied in the Kelmscott Press. Following Josiah Wedgwood, we see technology not as the enemy of craft but as a means of extending it — using invention and manufacturing to unite elegance and usefulness at scale.

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What we want to see

We are seeking ingenious applications of the fusion between heritage craft and innovative technology. We are casting our net widely because true innovation affects both the object and the method of its creation.

Britain’s heritage has always been defined by this dual ambition:

• Sheffield makes cutlery and perfected the crucible steel process.

• Northamptonshire mastered shoemaking and scaled Goodyear welting.

• Stoke-on-Trent makes ceramics and invented the bone china process.

Entries should demonstrate this spirit of “future heritage” in one of two ways (the best will do both):

1. A product: An artefact that brings together craft and technology to solve a specific challenge.

2. A method: A deep redesign of a process or supply chain. One might design a new way of making, joining, or sourcing that combines heritage wisdom with cutting-edge tools — ideally illustrated through the creation of a physical prototype.

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Ultimately, we want innovations that use advanced technology to extend deep craft traditions into practical applications such as:

• Not Quite Past applies tastefully calibrated generative AI to ceramics design and digital printing.

• Petit Pli uses origami principles and advanced materials to create clothing that grows with children.

• WikiHouse revives ancient Korean wedge-and-peg timber joinery through CNC-milled construction.

• Monumental Labs uses CNC robots to carve stone into beautiful statues.

• Zaha Hadid Architects fuses 3D printing with voussoir masonry techniques to build unreinforced bridges.

• Aranda/Lasch’s ENLACE applies algorithmic design to master rattan weaving and create personalised bistro chairs rooted in traditional handicraft.

• The Warp is a tea house built with 3D-printed recycled wood-sawdust panels constructed through Japanese tsugite and shiguchi joinery.

• Archi-Union Architects deploys robotic bricklaying to reinterpret parametric “jali” techniques, extending masonry craft through computational precision.

• Sony is integrating generative AI into the centuries-old grammar of Nishijin kimono textiles to preserve and expand endangered weaving traditions.

• Tavs Jørgensen’s 3D-printed cob bricks combine vernacular earthen construction with digital extrusion moulds to create hyper-sustainable brickcraft.

For a deeper dive into these inventions, check out the deep dives on the kinds of creations we are seeking:

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Eligibility & Britain

Entries should address challenges relevant to Britain and/or globally.

We are, of course, concerned with aesthetics. Yet, we are open to inventions that leverage craft and tech to respond to all sorts of economic, environmental, cultural, and infrastructural challenges — provided the scope is clearly defined.

We seek work with deep material or cultural roots in Britain, grounded in its crafts, landscapes, skills, supply chains, or infrastructure, where that rootedness is evident in the thinking and making, not just the narrative. However, projects can draw on ideas, crafts, and technologies from all over the world. For example, Petit Pli combines advanced materials with origami and pleating to make clothes that grow with children — it’s British, Japanese, and relevant to every child in the world.

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We define craft broadly — one could take inspiration from a craft documented by Heritage Crafts. Yet these are generally limited to material crafts from arrowmaking to wainwrighting. You can go further. We are fascinated by artisanship from across the world and from different categories, from fashion and homeware to food production and housebuilding. The possibilities are endless.

The Cræft Prize dreams of a wondrous pantheon of techno-cræft innovation spanning across categories and cultures.

The prize is open to individuals and teams over the age of 13. Anyone aged between 13 and 18 will require written consent from a parent or guardian to participate.

Judging criteria

Entries will be judged against six criteria:

1. Ingenuity: invention in form, function, or method.

2. Cræft depth: alignment between material, place, and process.

3. Beauty: aesthetic excellence that endures.

4. Usefulness & scalability: repeatable and beneficial beyond the one-off.

5. Integrity: sustainability, honest sourcing, and social value.

6. Future heritage: contribution to our future material culture.

The prize will be judged by

• Dr James Fox — Cambridge art historian and broadcaster, author of Craftland

• Zoe Laughlin — artist, maker and director of the Institute of Making at UCL

• Julia Willemyns — co-founder of the Centre for British Progress

• Helen Brocklebank — CEO of Walpole, the sector body for British luxury

• Debika Ray — arts and design journalist, former editor of Crafts magazine

• Professor Roger Kneebone — Imperial surgeon-turned-professor, author of Expert

• Jimmy McLoughlin OBE — host of Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, former No.10 adviser

You can learn more about the judges here:

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Format

Model: Call for Inventions → Shortlist of 6 → Production/Scaling Phase → Final Judging → One Winner.

• The Process:

  1. Step 1: We select 6 finalists based on the potential of their invention.

  2. Step 2: Each finalist receives a grant of approximately £5,000 immediately. They use this funding to raise the ambition of their product further before the final selection.

  3. Step 3: The final winner is judged on the finished product and process — and awarded £30,000.

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The Prize

• Production Funding for 6 Nominees

  • £30,000 total pot distributed upfront to the 6 makers.

  • Approximately £5,000 to each, depending on their requirements to scale and build an exhibit.

• Medals & Trophy:

  • All finalists receive a “Cræft Medal”.

  • The overall winner receives a £30,000 grant to spin out their invention (we take zero equity in any inventions, but will happily introduce you to potential investors).

• Profiles:

  • All shortlisted finalists are to be launched into the world by Nation of Artisans through film, editorial, and an exhibition.

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Who Can Apply

Individuals & Teams

• Applications are open to individuals and teams.

• We expect the best teams to combine knowledge of technology, design, and craft.

• Existing organisations are welcome to apply, but the invention must be new e.g. it should be brought to the world through the prize.

Location

• Applicants may be based in Britain or abroad, but inventions should be able to be manufactured or demonstrable in the United Kingdom.

• If selected, you must be in Britain for interviews, filming, and the exhibition.

Age

• Applicants must be 13 years of age or older. Applicants under 18 must have the consent of a parent or legal guardian.

• There is no upper age limit. If you have an extremely offline grandparent with the skills and creativity, share this with them. Better yet, why not submit with them?

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How To Submit

Your submission must include:

• A tweet-length description of your invention. Brand it, create a bit of razzle dazzle. A little creative magic will help your idea.

• A detailed 1500-word document explaining the invention and its craft heritage, technology, and value. Check out the TechnoWithy for inspiration.

• A 2–3 minute video explaining the invention.

• Multimedia supporting content e.g. pitch deck, images, documentation, brand, website etc.

• If your invention can be posted to me, then we would also love to see it.

Applications should present developed inventions. Early sketches or speculative ideas are unlikely to be considered unless there is a very clear path to bringing it into the world.

You can submit on the Nation of Artisans website:

Prize Submission Portal

Timeline

• March 2026 —Call for applications.

• August 2026 — Application window closes 31st August 2026.

• September 2026 — Judges filter down to a long list and a short list.

• October-November 2026 — Six nominees win grants and start to scale.

• December 2026 — Final judging on the six inventions.

• January 2027 — Exhibition and winner announced

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Communications & Enquiries

The purpose of this prize is to build an ecosystem of technologist-cræfters. If you have questions and ideas, please get in touch. If you meet others to work with, we will do our best to matchmake.

More importantly, this Substack (and Nation of Artisans’ Instagram page) is the primary channel we will use to communicate. Be sure to subscribe to avoid missing any updates.

Email louis@nationofartisans.com with your questions.

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Go Forth and Multiply

This prize requires creating and catalyzing a new network and community of technologist-cræfters. If you know of any person or organisation who would be interested — as a potential applicant or partner — please share this with them. Share it far and wide.

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Partners & Supporters

The Cræft Prize is currently financially supported by Tyler Cowen at Emergent Ventures. It is also partnered with the Centre for British Progress and Interlace. If you want to join that list, get in touch.

Email Louis Elton

The £60,000 Cræft Prize launched in March 2026 to discover inventions combining the deep wisdom of craft with cutting edge technology.

The prize is in its inaugural year. We simply do not know what it will produce. The notion of the ‘artisan-technologist’ is only just emerging.

While book, art, and architecture prizes have a very clear output, the disciplinary breadth and conceptual eccentricity of the prize mean that judging entries is not straightforward.

It requires deep expertise from across fields, from craft and manufacturing to technology and business. As such, to help determine who will be awarded the six £5,000 grants — and who will eventually take home the additional £30,000 — I’ve assembled a team of brilliant minds from the pinnacle of their respective fields. Behold.

Dr James Fox

First on the team sheet is James Fox. A Cambridge art historian at Emmanuel College and BAFTA-nominated broadcaster, he is perhaps best known for his BBC art documentaries. Fox is also the author of The World According to Colour and Craftland, and Creative Director of the Hugo Burge Foundation, which supports arts and crafts across Britain.

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Dr Zoe Laughlin

Zoe Laughlin is an artist, maker, and materials engineer. She is the co-founder and director of the Institute of Making at UCL — a miraculous workshop-and-laboratory. Laughlin holds a PhD in materials science from King’s College London and an MA from Central Saint Martins, and works at the intersection of creativity and materials. Radio 4 listeners will know her from The Kitchen Cabinet. She is also the author of Material Matters: New Materials in Design.

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Julia Willemyns

Julia Willemyns is the co-founder of the Centre for British Progress — a non-partisan think tank making the case for a new era of British growth and renewal. Her work sits at the intersection of technology and policy, from AI to high-skilled immigration to the commercialisation of research. Willemyns has held roles at Schmidt Futures and Renaissance Philanthropy.

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Helen Brocklebank

Helen Brocklebank is the CEO of Walpole, the sector body for British luxury, representing some 270 members — from Burberry and Rolls-Royce to the smallest ateliers. Brocklebank built her career in publishing, at Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire and ELLE, before becoming the cheerleader-in-chief for British luxury.

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Debika Ray

Debika Ray is an arts and design journalist writing for the Financial Times, Apollo and Kinfolk. She is the former editor of Crafts magazine and former head of editorial at the Crafts Council. Ray has also directed the Global Design Forum at the London Design Biennale.

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Professor Roger Kneebone

Roger Kneebone is a trauma surgeon turned GP turned professor at Imperial College. He is the co-founder of the Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science, which was recently profiled by Nation of Artisans. His book Expert traces the road from apprentice to master. Kneebone has spent a career tracing expertise wherever it lives — in operating theatres, on Savile Row, and among hairdressers, taxidermists, and embroiderers. He is a member of the Art Workers Guild.

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Jimmy McLoughlin OBE

Jimmy McLoughlin is the founder and host of Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, the podcast in which he interviews Britain’s leading entrepreneurs and politicians about the future of work — most recently scoring one of the first exclusive interviews with Andy Burnham after he became Prime Minister. He previously also worked inside Downing Street as a special adviser on business and enterprise. In 2024 he was appointed to the King’s Awards for Enterprise Advisory Panel and made an OBE for services to business and entrepreneurship.

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Some remarks

I’m delighted that we were able to assemble such an esteemed and multi-disciplinary jury for the inaugural Cræft Prize.

All come from very different worlds but are united by a shared interest in the possibilities created when one combines the best of craft with the best of technology.

However, having an exceptional judging panel will count for nothing if there are not enough brilliant applications. With just four weeks left to submit, I urge you to submit your ideas, concepts, and products to the prize.

Further, if you know of anybody working on any weird, wacky, or beautiful innovation that combines the deep wisdom of craft with the cutting-edge power of technology, please share the prize with them.

Further information is available at:

https://www.nationofartisans.com/prize
https://nationofartisans.substack.com/p/introducing-the-british-crft-prize

Media & enquiries to:

Louis Elton
louis@nationofartisans.com

Open Call: The Cræft Prize

Calling all maverick and misfit makers, creative technologists, industrial designers, artisan-engineers of Britain and the wider world. It is time to come together and fuse heritage with the future to spark a new renaissance.

Today, we launch The Cræft Prize, a new national award of £60,000 searching for creative technological and aesthetic inventions.

The twist? This is no ordinary design or innovation competition. We are seeking innovative responses to today’s biggest challenges, inviting inventors to combine the deep wisdom of crafts of the past with cutting-edge technologies of the future.

The competition is designed to inspire a wave of creativity, innovation, and aesthetic magic. It is open to all the merrie people of Britain and beyond, by birth or adoption.

Share

Why it exists

The Cræft Prize is the brainchild of Nation of Artisans — a project founded by Louis Elton in 2025 to explore Britain through the lens of the strange alchemy of heritage craft, industrial power, and cutting-edge innovation.

Britain is a land of deep craft and creative heritage. It is also a pioneer of some of the world’s most important industrial and technological innovations.

Yet these two traditions have drifted apart. Britain’s craft world is rooted but increasingly fragile, often trapped trying to conserve a way of life whose material foundations have already vanished.

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, our techno-innovation industries are revolutionary, but lacking in soul and meaning, often dissolving the communities and traditions that once enabled harmony and flourishing.

The Cræft Prize exists not to preserve ashes, but to light a new fire.

The prize aspires to incubate radical, practical creations — and a wider ecosystem — that proves heritage and innovation can be dynamic partners. By combining craft knowledge with emerging technology, the prize aims to address Britain’s identity and innovation crisis through a new mode of AI: artisanal intelligence.

On “Cræft” & Technology

“Craft” is a word that invites argument. Is it only handmade? Is it opposed to technology and industry? In popular usage, it often collapses into twee imagery: Etsy sellers and nostalgic handicraft. While we value human-scale making, the Cræft Prize is aimed at something more ambitious.

The name draws on the Anglo-Saxon word “cræft”. Popularised by 9th-century King Alfred, cræft is not just manual skill, but the virtuous application of knowledge and power to produce excellence in a way that binds hand, eye, heart, mind, material, place, and history into a coherent practice. The term was revived by historian Alexander Langlands in his 2018 book Cræft.

Thus, the prize is avowedly pro-technology, but against slop. At its best, technology is about doing more with less, a principle long shared by craft, engineering, and invention.

Following William Morris, we reject technology that produces ugly, soulless, and inhumane things, seeking instead the union of beauty and utility embodied in the Kelmscott Press. Following Josiah Wedgwood, we see technology not as the enemy of craft but as a means of extending it — using invention and manufacturing to unite elegance and usefulness at scale.

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What we want to see

We are seeking ingenious applications of the fusion between heritage craft and innovative technology. We are casting our net widely because true innovation affects both the object and the method of its creation.

Britain’s heritage has always been defined by this dual ambition:

• Sheffield makes cutlery and perfected the crucible steel process.

• Northamptonshire mastered shoemaking and scaled Goodyear welting.

• Stoke-on-Trent makes ceramics and invented the bone china process.

Entries should demonstrate this spirit of “future heritage” in one of two ways (the best will do both):

1. A product: An artefact that brings together craft and technology to solve a specific challenge.

2. A method: A deep redesign of a process or supply chain. One might design a new way of making, joining, or sourcing that combines heritage wisdom with cutting-edge tools — ideally illustrated through the creation of a physical prototype.

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Ultimately, we want innovations that use advanced technology to extend deep craft traditions into practical applications such as:

• Not Quite Past applies tastefully calibrated generative AI to ceramics design and digital printing.

• Petit Pli uses origami principles and advanced materials to create clothing that grows with children.

• WikiHouse revives ancient Korean wedge-and-peg timber joinery through CNC-milled construction.

• Monumental Labs uses CNC robots to carve stone into beautiful statues.

• Zaha Hadid Architects fuses 3D printing with voussoir masonry techniques to build unreinforced bridges.

• Aranda/Lasch’s ENLACE applies algorithmic design to master rattan weaving and create personalised bistro chairs rooted in traditional handicraft.

• The Warp is a tea house built with 3D-printed recycled wood-sawdust panels constructed through Japanese tsugite and shiguchi joinery.

• Archi-Union Architects deploys robotic bricklaying to reinterpret parametric “jali” techniques, extending masonry craft through computational precision.

• Sony is integrating generative AI into the centuries-old grammar of Nishijin kimono textiles to preserve and expand endangered weaving traditions.

• Tavs Jørgensen’s 3D-printed cob bricks combine vernacular earthen construction with digital extrusion moulds to create hyper-sustainable brickcraft.

For a deeper dive into these inventions, check out the deep dives on the kinds of creations we are seeking:

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Eligibility & Britain

Entries should address challenges relevant to Britain and/or globally.

We are, of course, concerned with aesthetics. Yet, we are open to inventions that leverage craft and tech to respond to all sorts of economic, environmental, cultural, and infrastructural challenges — provided the scope is clearly defined.

We seek work with deep material or cultural roots in Britain, grounded in its crafts, landscapes, skills, supply chains, or infrastructure, where that rootedness is evident in the thinking and making, not just the narrative. However, projects can draw on ideas, crafts, and technologies from all over the world. For example, Petit Pli combines advanced materials with origami and pleating to make clothes that grow with children — it’s British, Japanese, and relevant to every child in the world.

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We define craft broadly — one could take inspiration from a craft documented by Heritage Crafts. Yet these are generally limited to material crafts from arrowmaking to wainwrighting. You can go further. We are fascinated by artisanship from across the world and from different categories, from fashion and homeware to food production and housebuilding. The possibilities are endless.

The Cræft Prize dreams of a wondrous pantheon of techno-cræft innovation spanning across categories and cultures.

The prize is open to individuals and teams over the age of 13. Anyone aged between 13 and 18 will require written consent from a parent or guardian to participate.

Judging criteria

Entries will be judged against six criteria:

1. Ingenuity: invention in form, function, or method.

2. Cræft depth: alignment between material, place, and process.

3. Beauty: aesthetic excellence that endures.

4. Usefulness & scalability: repeatable and beneficial beyond the one-off.

5. Integrity: sustainability, honest sourcing, and social value.

6. Future heritage: contribution to our future material culture.

Judges to be selected from a breadth of worlds at the intersection of innovation, technology, design, and craft.

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Format

Model: Call for Inventions → Shortlist of 6 → Production/Scaling Phase → Final Judging → One Winner.

• The Process:

  1. Step 1: We select 6 finalists based on the potential of their invention.

  2. Step 2: Each finalist receives a grant of approximately £5,000 immediately (depending on specific needs). They use this funding to raise the ambition of their product further before the final selection.

  3. Step 3: The final winner is judged on the finished product and process — and awarded £30,000.

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The Prize

• Production Funding for 6 Nominees

  • £30,000 total pot distributed upfront to the 6 makers.

  • Approximately £5,000 to each, depending on their requirements to scale and build an exhibit.

• Medals & Trophy:

  • All finalists receive a “Cræft Medal”.

  • The overall winner receives a £30,000 grant to spin out their invention (we take zero equity in any inventions, but will happily introduce you to potential investors).

• Profiles:

  • All shortlisted finalists are to be launched into the world by Nation of Artisans through film, editorial, and an exhibition.

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Who Can Apply

Individuals & Teams

• Applications are open to individuals and teams.

• We expect the best teams to combine knowledge of technology, design, and craft.

• Existing organisations are welcome to apply, but the invention must be new e.g. it should be brought to the world through the prize.

Location

• Applicants may be based in Britain or abroad, but inventions should be able to be manufactured or demonstrable in the United Kingdom.

• If selected, you must be in Britain for interviews, filming, and the exhibition.

Age

• Applicants must be 13 years of age or older. Applicants under 18 must have the consent of a parent or legal guardian.

• There is no upper age limit. If you have an extremely offline grandparent with the skills and creativity, share this with them. Better yet, why not submit with them?

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How To Submit

Your submission must include:

• A tweet-length description of your invention. Brand it, create a bit of razzle dazzle. A little creative magic will help your idea.

• A detailed 1500-word document explaining the invention and its craft heritage, technology, and value. Check out the TechnoWithy for inspiration.

• A 2–3 minute video explaining the invention.

• Multimedia supporting content e.g. images, documentation, brand, website etc.

• If your invention can be posted to me, then we would also love to see it.

Applications should present developed inventions. Early sketches or speculative ideas are unlikely to be considered unless there is a very clear path to bringing it into the world.

You can submit on the Nation of Artisans website:

Prize Submission Portal

Timeline

• March 2026 —Call for applications.

• August 2026 — Application window closes 31st August 2026.

• September 2026 — Judges filter down to a long list and a short list.

• October-November 2026 — Six nominees win grants and start to scale.

• December 2026 — Final judging on the six inventions.

• January 2027 — Exhibition and winner announced

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Communications & Enquiries

The purpose of this prize is to build an ecosystem of technologist-cræfters. If you have questions and ideas, please get in touch. If you meet others to work with, we will do our best to matchmake.

More importantly, this Substack (and Nation of Artisans’ Instagram page) is the primary channel we will use to communicate. Be sure to subscribe to avoid missing any updates.

Email louis@nationofartisans.com with your questions.

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Go Forth and Multiply

This prize requires creating and catalyzing a new network and community of technologist-cræfters. If you know of any person or organisation who would be interested — as a potential applicant or partner — please share this with them. Share it far and wide.

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Partners & Supporters

The Cræft Prize is currently financially supported by Tyler Cowen at Emergent Ventures. It is also partnered with the Centre for British Progress and Interlace. If you want to join that list, get in touch.

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This week, a micro-dispatch from a research lab at Imperial College London leveraging craft and cutting-edge technology to transform medicine.

From 3D printing bodies to train the surgeons of tomorrow on the trickiest procedures to using embroidery to stop knife crime: welcome to the other side of artisanal intelligence.

If you are a doctor, maker, or person of great means or influence and you want to scale the ambition of the lab, get in touch.

— Louis Elton, Founder of Nation of Artisans

On 24th June 1894, Sadi Carnot, the President of France, was stabbed in the abdomen by an Italian anarchist as he left a banquet in Lyon heading to the theatre. Unable to repair a severed vein, surgeons were powerless to stop Carnot from bleeding out on the operating table.

Sitting in the audience was a 20-year-old medical student named Alexis Carrel. Frustrated by the doctors’ inability to save Carnot, Carrel felt compelled to find a solution to the death sentence of severed veins.

In search of an elegant procedure, Carrel observed the work of fine lacemakers. Amazed by their precise thread management and remarkable dexterity, he wondered if their insights could be borrowed to repair severed blood vessels.

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Learning fine needlework from both his mother and an expert silk embroideress, Carrel developed the “triangulation” stitching method. He reconnected severed blood vessels and practiced transplanting organs between animals. Then he perfected his method on humans, going on to win the Nobel Prize in 1912.

Medical innovation has accelerated at lightspeed in the last century — AI drug discovery, gene therapy, stem cells are the hot stuff of today. Yet the magic of crafty R&D is not dead yet.

Hidden away in a lab in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, the spirit of Carrel is alive and well. The Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science (ICCESS) is a font of craft and medical innovation. Co-directed by Professor Roger Kneebone and Professor Fernando Bello, with Dr. Sofia Chacon leading the SHARP project, ICCESS tackles the knottier human challenges in medicine — the sort of problems that AI will never fix.

I stumbled into ICCESS by the quirk of some diligent fandom.

In the depths of lockdown in 2021, I swallowed a book called Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery by Roger Kneebone. Through a series of immersions in hyper-niche worlds of deep expertise, the book chronicles what it means to master one’s craft. From surgeons and lacemakers to taxidermists and magicians, Kneebone gets at the heart of what it means to be excellent at something. Expert is Nation of Artisans canon.

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I wrote to Kneebone in January and we met for coffee. His background is unusual. He first trained as a general and trauma surgeon, working in the UK and then in the war zones of Southern Africa. In the late 1980s, he returned to England and spent 17 years as a general practitioner in Wiltshire. While a GP, he completed his PhD in surgical education and in 2000, he joined Imperial College London.

Ever since, Kneebone has been utterly obsessed with the art and science of exceptional performance. In 2016, alongside Professor Aaron Williamon of the Royal College of Music, he launched the Royal College of Music–Imperial College Centre for Performance Science. The programme brings together experts from across multiple disciplines: surgeons, musicians, magicians, puppeteers, potters, tailors, fighter pilots, jazz musicians, and lacemakers. The centre studies how expertise is acquired and performed across radically different fields. Kneebone himself is also a harpsichord maker. He is artisanal intelligence incarnate.

Kneebone was kind enough to invite me to ICCESS to talk through their latest research. While ICCESS spins many plates, Kneebone and Chacon took me deep into two strands of work: one addressing knife crime through simulation and unconventional storytelling, another using 3D-printed neonatal bodies to train surgeons for the rarest and most difficult operations.

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The Power of SHARP

If you went to school in Britain, you’ll know that knife-crime prevention education is something of a blunt instrument.

As a child, one of my best friends got kidnapped by his teachers, left in an abandoned room with a (supposed) actor playing the role of a drug addict. The actor attempted to sell them drugs, then threatened to stab them all. Suffice to say, it traumatised my friend. Yet, many of his classmates went on to get involved in drugs and knife crime.

This “terror theatre” approach has been the standard model for decades. The idea that shock sparks behavioural change sounds good, but the evidence suggests otherwise. A systematic review by the Youth Endowment Fund found six evaluations of knife crime education programmes across the UK and US. None measured any impact on reducing actual violence.

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Worse, research on “Scared Straight” programmes — which used prison visits and inmate confrontation to deter juvenile offending — found that the intervention causes more harm than doing nothing.

The meta-analysis concluded that the more brutal and vulgar the presentation, the more likely it produces a backfire effect, intensifying rather than deterring the behaviour it sought to prevent.

Rather than attempt to scare children straight, Kneebone and Chacon have pursued a different path, called “sequential simulation”.

Developed at ICCESS, these simulations avoid presenting knife violence as a spectacle of terror. Instead, they deliver highly immersive journeys of cause and consequence, based on real-life stories and experiences of young people affected by serious violence. Participants first engage with the story through immersive virtual reality before transitioning into carefully designed physical simulation environments—ambulances, operating theatres, hospital rooms—where they experience the clinical and personal consequences of serious violence.

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These exceptionally realistic simulations feature handmade silicone models representing traumatic injuries, allowing clinicians to demonstrate lifesaving procedures such as bowel surgery and stoma formation. But Kneebone notes that “young people often come in expecting to see the violence itself, but that’s rarely what stays with them. What they remember are the consequences: the ambulance journey, the emergency surgery, the conversations with family members.”

By involving real paramedics, surgeons and healthcare professionals, and by focusing on authentic experiences rather than shock tactics, Kneebone’s programme pursues what medical educators call “embodied learning” — which has been consistently proven to generate more enduring behaviour change.

The programme has a two-phase structure. Participants complete the first stage, then return weeks later. In that time between, something shifts. Kneebone explains: “The time in between gives young people space to reflect, talk with peers and family, and process what they have experienced. When they return, many engage in deeper conversations, ask more challenging questions and show a greater awareness of how knife violence can affect individuals, families and communities. For us, that’s where the real learning happens.”

A paper in Advances in Simulation by Tribe, Harris and Kneebone found that the vast majority of participants recalled details of the experience and declared high reluctance to carry a knife.

Nobodies to Somebody

Elsewhere in the ICCESS lab, Kneebone and Chacon showed me something one would more likely expect to find in the V&A than a hospital: a hand-embroidered textile storybook representing the human body after a stabbing injury.

Inspired by Alexis Carrel’s interest in lacemakers and the craft-science continuum, Kneebone invited Fleur Oakes, a lacemaker and 3D embroiderer, to translate the wisdom the other way. Fleur is one of the world’s leading textile artists. When she and Kneebone first met, he was astonished by her delicacy and precision with needles and thread.

Trained in fine art and fashion design, Fleur had never been in an operating theatre. Kneebone arranged for her to become the embroiderer-in-residence at Imperial College’s vascular surgery unit in 2012. She spent the next few years observing Professor Colin Bicknell and his team carrying out complex operations on patients with diseased arteries and veins, then creating unique works of textile art.

After eighteen months of observation and creation, Oakes produced Somebody: a textile representation of the body’s layers, with exquisite fabrics representing different kinds of physical damage mirrored by unseen psychological scars. Kneebone sees the work as more than a book, but a work of art. It’s performed to young people by theatre director and puppeteer Rachel Warr.

A stab wound is a horrifying thing. High-fidelity storytelling and images can have the same effect of scaring children into justifying carrying a knife for protection. But Oakes’s storybook and Warr’s puppetry work differently —hypnotic without being didactic, simply explaining the medical and human anatomy of a stabbing, creating space for children to reflect and draw their own conclusions without relying on fear-based messaging.

This is a perfect example of actually existing artisanal intelligence in a very specific domain.

3D Printed Babies

From knife crime to precision surgery, the remainder of my tour explored the role of 3D printing in transforming elite performance in surgery.

On the workbench sat models of ribcages, silicone organs, and tiny anatomically accurate 3D-printed neonatal bodies. Beyond SHARP, ICCESS is pioneering a programme that 3D prints moulds, casts them in silicone, and builds surgical phantoms for practice. For Chacon, this work sits at the intersection of what medicine has always been: “a craft as much as a science.” What ICCESS does is take something that exists only as pixels on a screen — a CT scan — and turn it into something that can be held, explored and learned from. An engineer’s understanding of materials combines with a surgeon’s understanding of anatomy.

Chacon trained as a paediatric surgeon in Venezuela, where simulation barely existed. She learned because she had to — there was rarely the luxury of rehearsal. That experience shapes her conviction now: medicine depends on opportunities to practise, reflect and make mistakes in a safe environment before it matters most.

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Chacon explains that conditions such as oesophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula occur when a baby is born with the oesophagus ending in a blind pouch and an abnormal connection between the oesophagus and the trachea. Surgery must happen within 48 hours. It’s so rare that many paediatric surgeons will operate only a handful of times in their career.

One simply cannot learn these procedures by watching, but failure is catastrophic. The ICCESS team, led by Fernando Bello, 3D printed these models from CT scans of actual patients. The ribcage is printed rigid. The internal structures—oesophageal pouches and veins—are cast in platinum-catalysed silicone with exactly the right hardness to feel like tissue.

While still in early stages, an initial survey of forty paediatric surgeons validated the model, rating it 4.9/5 for surgical utility.

Is Craft the Future of Medicine?

Without going too techno-craft-utopian, ICCESS’s adventures in craft and technology are illustrative of a different way of conceiving the future of work, health, and technology.

There is endless discourse around automation and cutting-edge technology destroying jobs. Yet few talk about how technology—in symbiosis with an artisanally intelligent way of thinking about the world—could solve problems so difficult and so historically expensive to address that nobody bothered until now.

The work at ICCESS rests on a simple conviction that treating sick and injured people depends not just on science and medical knowledge, but on craftsmanship and emotional sensitivity. The same applies to engaging with young people about knife-related harm. SHARP combines all four — science, medical knowledge, craftsmanship, emotional sensitivity — with young people themselves at the centre. It’s that combination, Kneebone believes, that might help them grow up in a safer world.

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Where Next?

Long-time readers of Nation of Artisans already know that I am fascinated by how craft and technology can come together to transform culture and aesthetics, but my interests go much further and ICCESS is the exact type of frontier I want to explore further through the £60,000 Cræft Prize.

Where else could craft, science and technology come together? In mental health treatment? In disaster response? In designing cities? In education itself? If you have ideas, get in touch.

If you’re a maker, doctor, technologist, educator, or institution interested in the work that ICCESS is doing—please also get in touch. Particularly if you want to see ICCESS work go further.

Stella Matutina

For the last two weeks, I’ve been living at Stella Matutina — a new philosophical R&D institution hidden away in a slice of Switzerland crafted by the divine.

Set in the delightful campus of an ex-nunnery previously owned by the Sisters of Baldegg, Stella Matutina — meaning “morning star” — is a breathtakingly beautiful peninsula the on the shores of Lake Lucerne. The mission? To solve the grand philosophical challenges of the post-AI age.

I was invited to participate and present a talk on Artisanal Intelligence. Yet, I found something much bigger.

Stella Matutina will either become a centrifuge of philosophical, technological, and creative innovation that follows in the footsteps of the University of Jena, the Bauhaus, and Dartington Hall, shaping the course of the coming centuries. Or it could become an A24-worthy techno-folk cult for eccentric creative technologists where someone gets murdered. Both good.

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The cast of characters was exceptional.

Metascientists. Silicon Valley accelerationists and demonologists. Organists. Biotechnologists. Stafford Beer obsessives. Transhumanists and UFOlogists. Maple syrup Bopeas. People that talk to bats. Anthropic doom-mongers. Literal rock stars. Renaissance venture capitalists. I Ching shaman. Matcha mystics. Yogis. Memelords. Stoner horror filmmakers. Public health researchers. Philanthropists. Fashion designers. Conspiracy theorists. Endless architects, artists, philosophers.

My kindred spirits.

I first heard of Stella a few months ago. I met the co-founder Sylvan to talk Cræft Prize and artist-technologists. Sylvan quickly lured me in to Stella with talk of nuns, craft, technologies, and the mystery of European Cosmotechnics. After meeting his co-conspirators Haley and Tobias, I was hooked in.

Months later, knowing almost no one, I found myself deep inside Stella’s founding milieu dreaming of what it could become.

Stella’s dangerous mavericks were invited to give talks. I used my slot to give a lecture in the church.

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Artisanal Intelligence: an Ancient Dynamism & Blueprint for the Future

Part of the mission of Stella is to do the tricky thinking about how, in a potentially dystopian post-AI world, we forge an awe-inspiring civilisation. Why? The emergence of AI splinters various assumptions about the underlying concepts that have structured society since the Industrial Revolution.

My contribution was an examination of Artisanal Intelligence. We know that the distinctions between craft vs technology — or indeed artisanship vs science — are fairly recent conceptual innovations. The pioneers of the past often had to be all at once.

Yet if once again AI collapses context and disciplines, what are the interesting questions to explore? What are the meaningful categories and concepts that should shape the future?

Looking at Artisanal Intelligence at three levels — traditional, industrial, and on the cutting edge — I posed various questions for deeper R&D including:

• In what ways can craft serve as a blueprint for the future of work, life, and leisure?

• How would a new artisanal intelligence paradigm elaborate on the spirit of Josiah Wedgwood, William Morris, Walter Gropius?

• How can artificial and artisanal intelligence work together to create new paradigms of creation and production?

• What are the social and philosophical dynamics of the artisanal life that we should learn from?

• How do we keep skills alive to ensure tacit knowledge is not lost? What else could that tacit knowledge find when applied in different spheres? (e.g. advanced materials, manufacturing etc.)

• What old crafts could find a new lease of life with new applications?

• How can technologies resurrect and support dying crafts?

• How could the crafts of the past root the technologies of tomorrow?

• How could emergent technologies create meaningful products and forms that enrich our future culture?

• How could traditional crafts be deepened with insight from AI systems?(e.g. AI decoding hidden patterns)

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A Lab?

I also began to elaborate my vision for a future Artisanal Intelligence Lab. Imagine: a space to answer these questions in partnership with masters of art and craft, cutting-edge technologists, and frontier theorists.

The idea would be to incubate various practices and creations — both to recursively enhance theory and develop wonderful products and processes that could forge a rich, more soulful future.

This was all presented in a slide deck. Paid subscribers are welcome to read the attached PDF — but I shall be keeping it out of general circulation until the thinking is truly ready.

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The Presentation

The next bit is paywalled. Feel free to upgrade if you want to see it.

The Best of Stella

While you can’t all see the deck, I will share some images of Stella. It’s exceptionally cool and scenic.

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Cræft Prize Updates

• A reminder that the £60,000 Cræft Prize submissions window closes on 31st August 2026.

• There’s still plenty of time to throw your hat in the ring, but if you are not sure if your idea is eligible, please get in touch.

• There will be six nominees — each receiving £5,000 grants — and the winner gets another £30,000.

• If you know any makers, designers, creative technologists — or indeed artisan-technologists, engineers…. or any combination of the above combining technology and craft to make interesting new things for the world, please forward the prize to them and perhaps they can submit.

• Teaser: the judges have been assembled and will be announced in the coming weeks. It’s an all star cast.

Last week, while reading ’s excellent newsletter on the history of glassblowing in England, I learned that Jude Bellingham’s hometown of Stourbridge was once the home of glass. I suddenly imagined a world where young Jude had gone back in time and chosen glassblowing over football.

The England team hail from all over the country. All grew up in villages, towns, and cities that were once hubs of exceptional craft and manufacturing heritage.

Had they not become footballers, what types of craftsman could each player have become?

After some rapid research, I’ve assembled a team. Now, this is certainly not the team to pick on exclusively footballing grounds. I’ve elected to play certain players out of position, and there will be no centre backs. All decisions are inspired by stories of craft and industry rather than tactical excellence. But put these boys in a workshop, and they could wipe the floor with the Argentines.

Behold! The England Artisanal XI

Starting XI

1. James Trafford — Shepherd (GK)

Of course it will be controversial to drop Jordan Pickford. Yet, James Trafford’s real-world experience growing up on a family-run sheep and arable farm near Cockermouth in the Cumbrian Lake District means he’s well equipped to both feed and clothe the team with mutton and wool. Pickford may be a top shot stopper, but could he help a ewe give birth to a lamb on a cold, rainy evening in Stoke-on-Trent? For that reason alone, Trafford is the first name on the team sheet.

2. Nico O’Reilly — Spinner (LB)

Raised in Collyhurst and Ancoats, the home of the steam-powered spinning jennies that forged Manchester’s reputation as Cottonopolis and a textile maker to the world, O’Reilly is trained in the art of threading the needle. Whether it’s around an ominous Argentine right wing or a beautiful sheet of cotton, O’Reilly will spin rings around whatever he needs to.

3. Jarell Quansah — Wiremaker (RB)

If O’Reilly’s wrapping Messi up with cotton, Quansah will trip him with wire. Having grown up in Woolston, on the edge of Warrington, Quansah will be well versed in the art of wiremaking. From the Atlantic telegraph cable to the barbed wire strung across the Western Front, Quansah hails from a town so defined by wire that its rugby side is simply called ‘The Wire’.

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4. Jordan Henderson — Shipwright (CM)

Born in Sunderland, once the greatest shipbuilding town in the world, Henderson knows a thing or two about floating under pressure. Though past his prime and injured by an advertising board, when the tide comes in, Henderson is well equipped to steer a steady ship.

5. Kobbie Mainoo — Hatter (CM)

If you can keep your hat on while others lose theirs, then you’ll be a hatter my son. Raised in Cheadle Hulme in Stockport, which once housed over a hundred factories, made more felt hats than anywhere on the planet, and even to this day is the home to the Hat Museum, Mainoo promises to bring some glamour to the team who are mostly caught up in more utilitarian crafts.

6. Declan Rice — Aircraftsman (CM)

Rice learned his craft in Kingston upon Thames, the original home of Sopwith and Hawker, who built the fighter planes that powered the nation to victory in the Battle of Britain. Rice can cover serious ground box-to-box, clearing the goalline and launching deadly attacks, just like a Hurricane bomber.

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7. Bukayo Saka — Dyer (RW)

A Londoner, born and raised in Greenford, Saka is the heir to William Perkin — the inventor of the synthetic dye in 1856. While Perkin gave birth to the modern chemical dye industry, scaling the joy of colour in clothes and beyond, Saka too has the power to deliver techni-colour crosses deep in Argentina’s box.

8. Jude Bellingham — Glassblower (AM)

Bellingham hails from Stourbridge, the home of British glass. While it has been hot in Mexico City and Miami, Bellingham was born to handle the heat of the glasshouse. Without Bellingham, the England squad is molten and formless, but Jude knows how to hold his nerve amid the danger and sculpt into a thing of precision and beauty.

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9. Ivan Toney — Shoemaker (ST)

While he’s only in the squad as a dead-ball specialist for a potential penalty shootout, Toney’s got something else in his bootbag: the finest boots in the world. Born and raised in Northampton, the world home of shoemaking (documented in this very newsletter), Toney is a master of last-making and Goodyear welting. Keep your eye peeled for some studded brogues.

10. Harry Kane— Philosopher-Cræftsmun (ST)

Captain Kane is not just a ballcræftsmun, but a doubly-inspired philosopher too. Hailing from Walthamstow, the home of William Morris, the patron saint of British craft, Kane is equipped with the intellectual foundations to lead his band of merry craftsmen. Yet, he’s not just a theorist, but a practitioner too, having gone to Chingford Foundation School, which also educated Sir David Beckham and, more importantly, Sir Jony Ive — the designer of the iPhone.

11. Morgan Rogers — Anchorsmith (LW)

The final name on the team sheet is Bellingham’s childhood friend and Midlander Morgan Rogers. Raised in Halesowen, the Black Country’s chain-and-anchor heartland, Rogers will be no stranger to the forge where Walter Somers hammered out the Titanic’s anchor. Anchoring the team at 11, England will be unsinkable.

Now try this

If you have scrolled this far, well done. I promise to resume more sparky thinking and beautiful filmmaking after the end of the World Cup (and heatwave).

A reminder that there are fewer than 2 months to go before the submission window to the £60,000 Cræft Prize closes.

Until next time.

I'm delighted to share a new film about Kaymet, a fine tray and trolley maker based in Peckham. Who would have thought that a drinks tray factory is still active in London? Indeed, it's perhaps the world's most important tray and trolley maker.

It wasn't always a traymaker. Kaymet grew out of a radio shop, evolving into a sheet metal firm that specialised in radio chassis. Then during World War II, they became a key supplier of radar casings. After the war, in search of new markets, they got into the fine tray and trolley game — which they continue to dominate today.

A cursory glance at their list of stockists reveals that Kaymet is everywhere — Austria, Colombia, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Ghana, Hong Kong, the Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Nigeria, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Senegal — and much more. Kaymet is everywhere.

How did such a small niche product designer and manufacturer in such a specific category become the world leader? To find out, I visited the factory and interviewed Mark Brearley, the proprietor of Kaymet, who also happens to be the co-author of a book called Made in London.

If you enjoy the film and the interview below, please like and share so that Nation of Artisans can continue its mission of telling fascinating stories at the intersection of craft, industry, and innovation in Britain and beyond.

Today, everything Nation of Artisans does is free for the world. If you want that to stay the case, please consider becoming a paid subscribe

— Louis Elton, Founder of Nation of Artisans

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A Conversation with Mark Brearley, Kaymet’s proprietor

Who are you, and what is Kaymet?
I’m Mark Brearley and I am proprietor of Kaymet. We are a small producer of anodised aluminium serving trays and trolleys and, on the side, some electric table hotplates. We’ve been doing that since 1947 in the part of London we’re in now, in Peckham. Not always exactly there, but we’ve moved around in this bit of London ever since 1947, and actually ever since the earlier origins of the business before it became Kaymet.

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Can you tell us about the history of Kaymet before you came to it?
It’s a pretty classic story of city-generated startup. Happened to be an immigrant family, late-19th-century immigrant family like so many in London, and they ended up running some shops. One of them was a radio shop. They started doing a bit of manufacture of radio chassis, as we understand it, and that evolved into a small engineering sheet-metal-working business that picked up orders. Started in the basement of the radio shop, and then they took on some premises that were an old dye works, fabric printing, something like that, in Kennington Lane. Took on that factory space.

And during the Second World War, they flourished on the back of orders for military use: radars and radar casings and chassis. And then, like so many businesses after the war, they had to come up with what to do next with their capabilities and decided — surprise, surprise — homewares, booming world then. And stuck with aluminium and anodised aluminium, which again was pretty great for the moment because there was a world glut of aluminium and aluminium technology had advanced dramatically during the Second World War. And in contrast, there were problems with steel, etc., and plastics weren’t as advanced as they now are, and it doesn’t go rusty, and, oh, it’s lightweight. So it was still by the 1940s a wonder product. So they were pushing in a good direction. Indeed, there were several other — even in the UK, several other manufacturers of quite similar products popped up around that same era.

And they started making actually spun ware, which we don’t do anymore — like spun hollowware, salad bowls and things that are produced on a spinning lathe. Bins or wine coolers. So doing a lot of spun ware, and then simultaneous with that they started producing trays, fabricated trays, and then not long after started doing trolleys. And it’s some of those classic designs that have stood the test of time and that we still make.

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Can you tell us the story of how you came to be the proprietor of Kaymet?
I used to have a “proper job” and I actually worked for the Mayor in London. I was doing urbanism and running a team. We got quite involved in discussions around industrial land in London. We were on the side of “we shouldn’t be wiping it all out” as London grows. So, I was visiting a lot of industrial areas and was most curious about the manufacturing. It’s the most interesting bit of industry. It’s all very interesting how logistics works and how people with vans who go out and repair things work, but it’s just not quite as massively interesting as people making things. I think probably most people feel that way. When you walk around an industrial area and you realize in one shed somebody’s manufacturing something and you figure out what it is, it’s pretty fascinating.

I got curious and went back to City Hall to ask the people who know for the list of who manufactures in London. Of course, nobody knows. Nobody cares, even. I found that frustrating and thought I’d do it myself. I started researching and making a list and spent quite a few years doing that as a hobby. One of the things along the way was trying to persuade my wife that it wasn’t bonkers, so I decided to buy her some things as a birthday present. I’d spotted this logo on the way into work because I got the train that goes on the viaduct going into London Bridge. There was a shed with the Kaymet logo on the end and because I’d been doing this research I was eagle-eyed. I looked them up and that was one of the things we bought. We went to the factory and bought a couple of trays for the present. The proprietor got in touch with me a few months later and said, “Unfortunately, I’m liquidating the business. Have you got any ideas about who might want to take it on — any of what’s left?” That was how I came across it.

We decided quite quickly that we would take it on in collaboration with that ex-proprietor, Ken Schreiber. He still works for us. We knew nothing about it and set about rescuing the business, buying new machines — we lost a lot of machines in that process of liquidation. We had to set it up again, take on the building, and start the hunt for a new building because we didn’t want to get evicted, which was on the cards because they wanted to redevelop where we were. They were an “evil-ish” landlord/developer. So, we wanted to find a building and started those step-by-step with, “Oh yeah, I suppose we need a business strategy.” It’s got to be sell more bloody trays because otherwise, obviously, we haven’t got a business. Obviously, it’ll carry on haemorrhaging money like it was. That was the business strategy. We got busy repositioning it, making it more visible, and trying to sell more. It was only then later that I started to get my head around production and trying to improve that.

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Talk me through the manufacturing process.
We’ve got it fairly small. Sometimes it feels like working in a submarine. In fact, workshop factory space: 4,000 square foot. And there we do most of the metalwork. All of the assembly. Some key processes are sent out, especially anodising. We assemble mostly to order — as the orders come — because we have this very big range of sizes and finish options, and we’re tiny, and we ain’t got loads of space for stock, and we’re not super rich.

So though we produce plenty decent quantities, it’s not mass production in that sense. And it really makes a virtue of the fact that we’re pretty handmade, pretty craft-focused. And that of course is an advantage if you’re chopping and changing and making different versions for different orders — even making bespoke variants, which we do quite a bit of.

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Lots of people dislike people calling things produced in mass “craft”. Would you call this craft?
Sure. Sort of craft metalwork, which you will also interestingly find in places such as BAE Systems or big aerospace and precision-engineering places or toolmaking. They all have these very high-craft components. There’s an awful lot of craft in metalwork, and we’re at the small end, we’re at the workshop end, but absolutely it’s craft-based. Let’s define craft as workmanship of risk. There’s a lot of risk involved. It can all go wrong. It needs hand-eye judgment.

Tell me more about that definition. Where does it come from?
Ah, David Pye is worth looking at. He was this extraordinary — he spent a lot of his time making these carved wooden bowls. He was a kind of trained craftsman. He made these big hand-machines for carving these giant bowls. But he also wrote about craft, and it’s in one of his books that he gets to this idea that it’s about what he calls “workmanship of risk” as a kind of working definition. It’s well worth reading.

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Could you grow a lot bigger and still be considered in that definition?
Yes, I think so. You could more mechanise and automate some of what we do, and I wouldn’t say we desperately never want to do that. But it would still have a lot of judgment-based, risk-based work. I think it’s just in the nature of what we produce. I think you’d have to make a very different design of products to make them more push-a-button friendly. They’re not those kind of products. They’re quite special, the outcome of, I suppose, a different era when they were conceived.

All our designs are from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s. We’ve evolved them since. We still feel they’re very much our designs. They’re alive. They’re not frozen in time. But the origins of them, the principles behind them are by now historic. And you wouldn’t necessarily come up with the same method of making if you were trying to tune it to be super-efficient and push-a-button friendly. So that means we’re in a place where you play to your strengths. And one of those is that we can vary them. We can do different finishes. It’s very small batches. We can make one of a particular finish and size if that’s what people want.

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Why don’t they have named designers?
It’s just the accident of history. I guess they’re part of a different tradition where designs evolved from a company and the draftsman helped out and everyone figured it out together and you didn’t buy in a designer. And of course, if you did, they weren’t going to be named. That was a kind of ‘50s and ‘60s thing where designers started to push for getting the right credit for what they were doing and it became a standalone business. We’re in a way from an earlier tradition. It’s more organic and vernacular from the business, and there’s a lot to enjoy about that. And one of the consequences of that is that we feel we have licence — we are still part of a living evolution of the design.

The designs have evolved over the decades, especially slightly more complex products, the trolleys. They’ve evolved in some quite big jumps: the way that they’re made, the way the design is configured. And there were a lot of other products that Kaymet made. Some of them are terrible, terrible designs. So you look through the old workbooks that we’ve got and you think, “Oh my God, did we really make that?” So there’s a kind of Darwinian evolution; the ones we make now are the ones that are pretty good, pretty simple, nice designs that you keep working on.

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And by “we,” you mean everyone involved who’s working?
Everyone involved here. We got one of the most skilled metalworker who’s been with the business many years. Our general manager, who is the son of the founder. He has a lot of understanding and knowledge and memory of the products and is a good sounding board for practicality and producibility. And then me and my wife, who’s part of the business — we discuss and get a second opinion and she comes up with things. So it’s that kind of collaborative process, and then sometimes working with designers and producers of elements to refine the design. So we’re currently working on a new handle, and that is a collaboration with some young designers. And then in that same little conversation with Ron in production and Ken, general manager, in the office, and figuring out what we think can work, discussion with the producers and all that.

Is that a Supreme tray?

This one was done as a collaboration with Supreme, who approached us. They do these extremely wonderful other products as limited-edition drops; amazing things. We were really excited when they approached us. This, I think probably the Trump tariffs killed, because lots of things didn’t happen at the same time. Maybe it’ll come back! We made it, and then they said we’ve pulled the plug on lots of collaborations this year, and we assumed it was immediately after the Trump tariffs happened and it was all confusion.

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You’ve also written a book called Made in London: From Workshops to Factories (2022) with Carmel King and Clare Dowdy. What is it about London and manufacturing that is so fascinating to you?

I am really interested in cities. It’s been a big part of my life and career. I have a belief in — the phrase I would use is “a good city has everything,” and another phrase would be “a good city has industry as part of the everything.”

I do think it’s important that cities are able to welcome a diverse economy. I always see it as positive and enjoy it when I see extraversion and visibility to that diverse economic range in a city, including manufacturing. When you see people making things, you think, “Wow, this is positive.” It’s only afterwards that you try and figure out why you think it’s positive. The first thing is a sort of gut feeling. Then you think, “Oh, it’s positive because it’s good if everyone, including school kids, can see everything that people do in life when they’re growing up or when they’re passing by on their way to work.”

It’s good that people understand where stuff comes from. Then you get into more straightforward economic arguments. It’s better for resilience if you have a very diverse economy. It’s better for everyone in society if there’s the kind of jobs that suit some people who prefer those kinds of jobs — they’re more practical or they’re less wordy, whatever. It’s good to have an economy that provides a rich diversity of employment types. I personally think that we have lost touch with how things are made.

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Why is it so important that we see and understand?
I think I would position it as part of a wider question. If you hide away your criminal justice system — like if you move all the courthouses to the edge of town next to a motorway junction and you hide away all the prisons in forests because you think they’re ugly and a bit scary, and you never see a policeman — that’s society-problematic because we all kind of buy into the criminal justice system. It should be visible. You should be able to see the process happening.

Ditto everything to do with healthcare and hospitals. If you hide away when people are ill and separate it from society, something feels really, really wrong about that. Segregation doesn’t feel like it creates a good society. I don’t think it’s a good thing to completely segregate away and make invisible to the generality of people how logistics happens. Is it disturbing that most people never see a ship and don’t understand that people are relying for everything they have on ships? It’s a massive industry, and yet it’s almost invisible. There’s a little bit of a class thing going on: “Oh, all that dirty working stuff, we don’t want to see it, thanks.” I just think it all should be visible.

Making is a fundamental thing. Not everyone needs to make things, but it’s something that a very large proportion of people gain something from and have an aptitude for. It’s really good when that’s present and preferably not “nichified” to an extreme, which is the danger — it becomes a kind of niche hobby activity that gravitates towards the more prosperous people. The whole “craft” thing has a disturbing side. You’re pedalling to try and avoid that — no, this is mainstream and there’s craft in everything.

I’m in a conversation about an exhibition about craft in industry. One of the things mentioned by the curator in our discussion was Airbus. The Airbus people said, “You should understand that this is craft activity. Most of what we do making aeroplanes is a craft-based thing.” Even a company like that understands that actually what they do is small-batch. A lot of it is super high-tech and automated, but at its heart, much of it is a craft operation. Reminding people that craft and the relationship between a human brain and making things is a mainstream part of huge ranges of production that we rely on is important. It’s not just people gaining great satisfaction from doing some ceramics in their evening classes.

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Why is making in Britain important to British identity?
Well, you don’t want to get lured into an exceptionalism trajectory. The UK is not exceptional in the world. Nevertheless, it is a country that has particularly strongly embedded making because of its early move into being industrial and its one-time dominance in global manufacturing.

A city like London probably was the largest manufacturing city in the world at one time, and even then, people were not really aware of it because it was so diverse and “un-grim.” Places that were more famous were doing textiles or steel — much more spectacular and singular. London was always secondary, doing thousands of different things. But it was colossal — it had thousands of garment factories, for example.

A lot has survived. A lot of new has built on what’s in the earth, the collective memory, and the residues of skills that can be revived before they die. It is frustrating that the UK has been a bit weak on it. You compare it with France, which has equivalent histories, and yet in the more niche and craft-based sectors, they’ve done much better.

They have luxury houses like LVMH and Richemont that have really managed to nurture, invest in, and push forward some of these high-end, craft-based businesses. In the UK, we haven’t really had the same push. It’s surprising that the government does an industrial strategy and there’s no mention of luxury craft. It’s all about super-tech stuff, advanced manufacturing, and biomed.

Those are brilliant, but it’s surprising that this other obvious chunk of strength is not really being pushed. We don’t have big champions like LVMH who are able to say, “Okay, we’ll build a brand new factory here and train leather workers, or buy that tannery because we need the leather.” They’re supporting the whole ecology. We haven’t really got those champions here. The capabilities and businesses are there, but it’s not being pushed.

Thank you very much for taking the time to chat to us Mark. Shall we go and have some pie at Manze’s?

I recently proposed a deliberately wild “Request for Cræfts” list of ideas to spark ideation and discussion about the £60,000 Cræft Prize in order to find more potential submitters. Why? Launching a prize with such an esoteric philosophy and vision is not straightforward.

It involves trying to inspire so many groups to think in an entirely new paradigm of design and technology — sparking technologists to think about how they can make things that are meaningful, and designers and artisans to think about how they may use their insights and magic to guide digitalised industrial modernity to a different future to the seemingly inevitable hyperslop world that we are unfortunately hurtling towards.

Now, we have had a lot of success in getting the prize into various different worlds — from the aesthetes of Country Life, Sotheby’s, London Craft Week, Royal College of Art, and even Elle Magazine — to Twitter virality among the engineers of various precision manufacturers, frontier developers, and techno-optimists.

Yet, the process of marketing a prize is very tricky. Given people work up to the deadline, one has no idea if any good submissions will come in until right at the end. Thus, one constantly has to find ways to disseminate the open call to the places where potential entrants are lurking. My Request for Cræfts was such an attempt, and it did rocket through the Internet… but perhaps for the wrong reasons.

For some, the Request for Cræfts post went off like a grenade. While long-time followers of Nation of Artisans and the Cræft Prize are no strangers to my eccentric ways, many without context went bananas and placed me in the stocks of the digital town hall and pelted me with virtual tomatoes.

And they were right to do so! It forces me to better articulate exactly what it is I am trying to do, and where there is likely a great deal of alignment, and where there are perhaps immutable differences.

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I loathe to do battle in the arenas of the comments section or the DMs. Anyone who has read my writing on social media and its consequences will know I think short-form content-powered culture wars will be the death of civil society (see here, here, and here). Indeed, I much prefer the slower, discursive debate rooted in good faith and a desire to find truth, rather than shallow online fights that shortcut the deeper foundations. That’s easy on Substack, but very difficult when you translate it into short-form media like Instagram.

Thus, I thought I would lay down my beliefs and vision to all ye who would see me executed by the devotees of craft — and the enemies of cræft!

To begin: where do I come from? I launched Nation of Artisans in 2025 to do several things. One, I simply wanted to explore the oceanic depth of craft in Britain and around the world. It was an excuse to visit endless workshops and make films telling the stories of marvellous makers.

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From the bigger world of stories of shoemakers in Northamptonshire to papermakers in the Lake District to the tiny ateliers of wooden spoon carvers and potters in London to luthiers and cabinet makers on the South Coast. It has been a great pleasure. There is so much to come. We have 20+ films in development, all celebrating the magic of the maker. It’s an entirely unprofitable labour of love made with the investment from my own day job. Though one day, I hope, I will be able to turn it into a more sustainable operation.

As I’ve articulated in various essays (see here and here), I see the artisan and the creative craft-led business as an essential path to countering the unceasing frontier of brain rot, de-skilling, culture wars, and cognitive atrophy that is plaguing society, unleashed by a new AI-powered wave of technological rupture.

However, while I enjoy telling these stories of craft, I also have an itch to go much further — and perhaps weirder.

Outside Nation of Artisans, I pay the bills through doing research and strategy (previously in academia, now commercially) on the philosophy and sociology of technological transformation and material culture, working primarily with technology companies and consumer brands.

I come from a somewhat esoteric research tradition rooted in the philosophy and sociology of technological transformation. Inspired by thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, Marshall McLuhan, Simone Weil, Neil Postman, Walter Ong, and many more, I am constantly on the hunt for ideas for how societies can pragmatically integrate technology in ways that foster harmony, rather than despair and discord.

Faced with fears that we are rapidly hurtling towards a dystopia I call “autonomous hyperslop“, where AIs scan social media for what’s trending, and dark factories whir through the night manufacturing whatever the algorithm craves, I have deep fears that the logical conclusion of the future is slop all the way down, leading to a great deskilling and an aesthetic monstrosity that torches all that is good and beautiful in the world.

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Now, of course we can counter this prevailing trend by embracing the artisanal. I wish we all would. But from what I know of the world of technology companies, mega-conglomerates, house builders, and government — few care. While, in my dream world, the government would be pouring billions into reviving the craft and we could forge some Bopea Arcadia, more pragmatically I am using the prize as a means of shifting perceptions of the techno-industrial people and sparking them to reimagine what sort of future they want to build.

I constantly think about the work of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, whose Inventing the Future warns against anti-tech spirals of ‘folk politics’ that retreat from the hard work of engaging with the realities of industrial modernity. Srnicek and Williams may be post-work accelerationists, but the warning is highly relevant. If our ambition for craft as a model of a better future retreats to the hand-made as the sole parameter of “authenticity”, we risks failing to meet the challenged posed by techno-industrial modernity. Meanwhile, I am animated by the Buddhist principle of ‘upaya’, or ‘skillful means’ — imparted to me by one of my favourite old professors, Ankur Barua, who taught me the ancient wisdom of using language and intelligent frameworks to guide the world in a particular direction by making the invisible visible.

The Cræft Prize is my own effort to weave a vision of a different future which restrains the worst excesses of autonomous efficiency-seeking that will flatten culture and the human, by asking the question: what if we put the artisan’s mindset at the centre of innovation? Crucially, through artisanal intelligence, not only the small scale of traditional artisanship.

It’s certainly an odd question to those who haven’t been on my strange journey into tech and craft with me, but it was compelling enough for Emergent Ventures to kindly award me a large grant to explore it further.

The prize has essentially become a tool for R&D, and my thinking from when it was launched in March 2026 has developed vastly, though I remain convinced that craft principles offer us a blueprint for our future and potentially offer solutions to many of society’s most tricky problems.

What began as an open call for people merging craft and technology to develop new paradigms of creation has turned into an endless list of questions that I have barely begun to scrape the surface of.

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Initially, I was simply inspired by amazing people using the blueprint of craft’s tradition in unison with technology to make fascinating, beautiful things that are attempts at solving vast problems, including:

1. Aeronautical material engineers at Petit Pli adapting advanced materials with the principles of origami and pleating to make clothes for children that grow up with them.

2. Aidan Hart, a sculptor-stonemason bypassing the shortage of apprentices by using robots to do the rough cuts, radically reducing the cost while enabling him to focus on the finer work on a statue he did at Lincoln Cathedral.

3. Rocket scientists in Tokyo using sashimono joinery as a means of creating more sustainable and lasting satellites that are resistant to the extreme temperature swings of the sun.

4. Oli Jessop, a luthier using a CNC mill because they could not find apprentices, and discovering that he could make entirely new wacky forms of guitars (Oli calls CNC engineering “a craft in itself”).

5. Tavs Jørgensen, a 3D printing expert and ceramicist developing specialist moulds to design unusually shaped cob-based bricks that are not only sustainable, but will create entirely new aesthetics for future house building.

6. Architects at WikiHouse applying the wedge-and-peg joinery principles of Korean architecture with CNC cutting and open source platforms to create sustainable, affordable housing around the world.

7. Archi-Union using 3D modelling and robotic arms to rescue waste brick and design and construct entirely new forms of parametric facades.

All of this and more re-affirmed my thinking that, following William Morris, technology should be used to eliminate the toil of the maker so that they can focus on the harder creative work and raise their ambition. Meanwhile, following from Glenn Adamson’s thesis, I think that craft is less a fixed category of objects than a process and a way of thinking and a lens through which to think about how we engage with the material world. In Adamson’s book The Invention of Craft, he argues that rather than a pre-industrial innocence under assault by the machine, craft as we know it was itself born of the industrial revolution — invented as industry’s “other” and entangled with it ever since. The romantic story, in which we must turn back the clock to rescue craft from industry, has the history backwards.

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To add yet more theory into the primordial soup from which the award hails, The Cræft Prize takes its name from a book by the historian Alexander Langlands called Cræft: How Traditional Crafts Are about More than Just Making. In the book, Langlands argues that to truly understand craft, we must go deeper into its roots via the Anglo-Saxon word “cræft”. Popularised by 9th-century King Alfred, cræft is not just manual skill, but the virtuous application of knowledge, skill, and power to produce excellence in a way that binds hand, eye, heart, mind, material, place, and history into a coherent practice.

That meaning has been semi-lost in modern English, but I find it striking that in German, if you are a nuclear power researcher you are called an “Atomkraftforscher”, while solar power is called Solarkraft! Who could forget that electronic synthpop pioneers Kraftwerk were the ultimate man-machines?

The prize started as an attempt to re-integrate this now more fragmented idea of craft into something legible to exceptionally skilled designers, engineers, makers, and artists who relish cross-disciplinary craft (or indeed cræft!). In hindsight, I might have called it something different. Perhaps something more attuned to the language of Creative Technology or Industrial Design.

But “Cræft” has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing as it’s such a distinctive and beautiful encapsulation that it immediately sparks interesting discussion with those open to engaging. A curse because to those in the world of traditional crafts, it can be taken as a threat, promising to automate away all that is good (which it is not, and never will be). You can hear me on the record in conversation on the Sotheby’s podcast alongside the Executive Director of Heritage Crafts and the CEO of the Hugo Burge Foundation — I am very clear that the prize’s grants will never be awarded to anyone trying to intentionally automate or substitute a craft that is currently viable.

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There are places where there are immutable differences between what I am trying to do versus the more traditionalist approach. There are those who, whatever the etymology, see craft purely as a hand-made discipline — the process, never the product. I think that is a completely valid way to see it. I revere purists.

Yet I am also a pragmatist (in the original sense!) When I see the wedge-and-peg wisdom of traditional Korean and Japanese joinery carried into a snap-together house or a wooden satellite, I am deeply inspired and sincerely believe it is craft — even if a robot is involved.

Craft, to me, is not only that singularly humane process but also a way of navigating the complexities of our world. Would the first masters of sashimono joinery, all those centuries ago, look at LignoSat and see a betrayal of what they began? Meanwhile, if someone were to find an intelligent way of beautifying the façades of 1.5m houses that are supposedly going to be built in the next five years by harnessing the spirit and skills of the pargetter at scale, the country could be an even more beautiful place.

I think there there is a special potential there, and perhaps it does not sit neatly in the category of craft at all. This is why I increasingly reach for a different term: “artisanal intelligence”.

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I am utterly convinced that artisanal intelligence is an essential path for shaping techno-industrial development to a more interesting, meaningful, and sustainable future. To that end, I’m grateful that some from the world of traditional craft have protested: it pushes me to further clarify what it is that I am really seeking.

Over the next fifty or hundred years, AI, robotics, and precision manufacturing technologies like 3D printing and CNC are going to remake what it means to make things, almost past recognition. The old maps don’t work any more, and very few of us are ready. I don’t have the answer. I have a conviction that the artisan’s mindset is the right place to begin, and the Cræft Prize is a small, experimental moonshot to find out what that may look like.

I expect the prize will surface all sorts of wacky things that are signals of that future — some good, some bad. In the meantime, I encourage anyone who still wants to pelt digital tomatoes at me to engage on this deeper, longer form level.

Provocation and discussion is essential and if there is any interest, I would love to organise a symposium, or indeed a debate, to push our collective thinking about what “craft as a blueprint for the future” truly means.

We could be at the precipice of something fascinating, but it is up to us all to shape what it looks like.

Loyal readers of Nation of Artisans may remember that last month, as part of London Craft Week, I sat on a panel at Sotheby’s entitled: “The Future of Craft: How do we keep our heritage skills alive?”

For those of you who could not make it, Sotheby’s have now put it up online as a podcast. It’s part of their excellent podcast series, Sotheby’s Talks.

I joined James Haldane, Executive Editor of Sotheby’s Magazine, Daniel Carpenter, Executive Director of Heritage Crafts, and Lucy Brown, CEO of the Hugo Burge Foundation discuss the future of craft and explore what it takes to keep craft alive in the modern world.

Answering tricky questions such as: Which skills matter most, and why? How can they be sustained, reimagined and made viable for the future? And what is lost when forms of knowledge rooted in the hand begin to disappear?

For fans of the Cræft Prize, this is just more of the same. For prize’s enemies, the talk gets very deep into the innovative power of craft as a blueprint for restraining the worst excesses of technological development.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

They also took several pictures of me looking very silly.

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“An infinite tide of AI-generated video is torching our retinas and our souls. Is this it? Is this really the future of culture?” NO. It must not be!

Yesterday, I published a new essay in UnHerd. It’s a grand thesis on how artisanal intelligence is the perfect antidote to the prevailing autonomous hyperslop torching our retinas and our souls.

The piece is a meditation that starts with a framing of slop and stagnation via Mark Fisher and Jon Askonas. I then decode two factions warring for our post-slop future:

1. Arcadians. The people who want to run away from the machine, e.g. tradwives, Bopeas, soil people, offal eaters, RETVRNists — via Rousseau, Thoreau, Morris, Heidegger, Kaczynski.

2. Prometheans. The people who want to fully embrace the machine, e.g. Andreessen, Karp, Marinetti, Thiel, Musk, Klein, Bastani

Then it gets weird as I draw upon John Ruskin, Paul Ricœur, architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton, Simone Weil, and King Alfred the Great’s ninth-century translations of Boethius to argue that while we cannot stop the machine, we can at least root it with a tradition to extend the good bits of culture, rather than be flattened by it!

I argue the answer isn’t Arcadian retreat or Promethean machine worship.

Rather, it’s artisanal intelligence: artisans and technologists fusing the deep wisdom of craft with cutting-edge technology to build things that are useful, beautiful, and scalable.

I actually wrote it in January while unpicking the philosophy behind the £60k Cræft Prize, but it took on a life of its own… crawling to self-indulgent 6000 words before the editors wisely negotiated me down from the edge of naval gazing, esoteric irrellevance.

My friends tell me it is still esoteric and navel-gazing. Give it a read and tell me if you agree!

How to end the Age of Slop

Strawberina and her husband Banannito are expecting. The baby is born, but shock horror: it’s a zucchini. Banannito breaks down in tears as Strawberina’s twisted affair with the scheming Zuchinito is exposed.

We live in bizarre times. For all of the tech industry promises that AI will unlock an age of abundance and innovation, it seems that so far, its greatest achievement is the mass proliferation of AI-slop anthropomorphic fruit TikTok micro-soap operas, which have gained billions of views in just a few months. An infinite tide of AI-generated video is torching our retinas and our souls. Is this it? Is this really the future of culture? An endless torrent of AI slop, engineered by an invisible Slopbeast.

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Most agree we should reject the Slopbeast. Humanity is built for greater things than amusing itself to death in TikTok pleasure palaces. However, few agree on how we move forward. The difficulty is that changing culture requires changing norms. Yet, if we have no sense of what should replace our current norms, then the task feels impossible. At both the individual and collective levels, few have any idea what humans ought to be beyond pleasure-seeking machines.

But AI did not create the Slopbeast, it merely fed it. As Mark Fisher wrote, we are living through “the slow cancellation of the future,” and amid this pessimism, a toxic nostalgia has become entrenched. The process was already well underway when Fisher was writing in the early 2000s, evident in endless Hollywood reboots, the “retromania” turn in music, the constant band reunions, the upcycling of fashion trends. This zombie culture was intensified by recommender algorithms that trend towards what pleases (or simply does not offend) the most people possible.

It has reached its apotheosis with large-language models which, short of unleashing new forms of cultural production, simply remix the detritus of the past. Our techno-industrial system has created mass audiences and vast production capacity, owned by investors who are increasingly incentivised to favour low-risk rent-seeking and margin expansion over innovation. As Jon Askonas argues: “The incentives for investors skew more every year towards the marketing, exploitation, and further development (aided by deepfake technology) of the old over the discovery of the new.”

In other words, cultural stagnation and the slop machine are the by-products of extreme market efficiency. And so, the dopamine-inducing delights of a Las Vegas casino have become the organising logic of the economy. Hence the slide into what Fisher calls “depressive hedonia”, a hollow existence where we compulsively chase cheap digital thrills not to feel good, but simply to numb ourselves. Our economic model feeds this cycle of distraction, entirely blinding us to the question of how we forge the future.

What, then, is to be done?

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The Arcadians vs the Prometheans

A spiritual war is brewing over the future of our culture in the age of AI. Two loosely connected factions have taken shape: I call them the Arcadians and the Prometheans.

The Arcadians believe humanity can free itself from the meaninglessness of the slop by recovering a sense of rootedness from the past. They take their name from Arcas, the son of Zeus who taught his people to weave, bake, and farm. He embodies the pastoral ideal of a life defined not by conquering nature, but by deep rootedness within it. Arcadians take many forms: digital detoxers swapping smartphones for dumbphones; trad-wives baking sourdough to reject the girlboss grind; the tradcath movement; vitalists consuming raw milk and offal to escape industrial food; and RETVRN aesthetes posting images of classical architecture on X. Among the privileged, this manifests as Bopeas — or bohemian peasants trading doomscrolling for doomstrolling, retreating into nature, Waldorf schools, and the revival of heritage rituals.

While the Arcadians’ politics often vary wildly, they share a hunger for community and rootedness. Taking their cues from everyone from Jean Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau to William Morris and Martin Heidegger (and even Ted Kaczynski), the Arcadians believe the war against digital ephemera requires embracing friction and things that are “real”. To the Arcadians, the idea of craft has gained a magical reputation as the antidote to the algorithm. Whether it is the tangible crust of sourdough, the ink of a real pen on paper, or the labour of a woodworker, they look to craft as a source of stability. If slop is easy to create, consume, and forget, craft is the opposite.

Now, many Arcadians have some good ideas. They are entirely correct that we ought to slow down and tune into the material world. There is profound wisdom lost to the efficiency of technological society, recovering some roots is essential.

Yet, as a political and cultural strategy, the Arcadian retreat is doomed to fail. Without some vast hidden fortune funding the lifestyle, or a genuine reduction in living standards, it is either financially inaccessible or a lot less aspirational than it looks on the screen. Further, the Arcadian appeal to some nebulous idea of “authenticity” can easily lead them to fetishise a pastiche of the past that never existed and no longer makes sense. People who learn from the wisdom of the past do not seek to live there. Aspiring to all live like chic bizarro Amish may ward off the slop for some, but it is unscalable. If we want to save the world, we cannot just retreat to the woods. We need a vision that is as powerful as the technology we face.

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This brings us to the Prometheans. Named for the Titan who stole fire from the gods, they embody the industrial ideal of using power and technology to transcend our limitations. The Prometheans agree with the Arcadians: the slop must stop. Yet rather than retreat to nature, they believe we must seize the means of computation. They want to capture the raw power of AI, nuclear energy, and heavy industry to deliver a new era of civilisational dynamism.

The obvious avatars of the movement are the modern oligarchs: Elon Musk with his visions of interstellar colonisation; Peter Thiel and his dream of using Palantir to fuse the digital and real-world infrastructure; Jeff Bezos with his Project Prometheus AI Lab; and one crypto entrepreneur’s mission to build a 305ft Great Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz. But the energy spans the political spectrum. On the right, it animates the so-called Effective Accelerationist (e/acc) movement as well as Marc Andreessen’s “American Dynamism” defence tech fund and his Techno-Optimist Manifesto (inspired by the Italian Futurist, Filippo Marinetti). The Yuppiefuturists also live here.

However, there are Prometheans of the left, too. Prometheanism fuels the emerging Abundance/YIMBY axis — progressives like Ezra Klein who argue we must aggressively deregulate and build our way to post-scarcity. Uniting them all is a hunger for agency. There was a strain of this thinking in Aaron Bastani’s decade-old vision of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, too. While the Arcadians crave rootedness in the past, the Prometheans demand mastery over the future.

The Promethean worldview is most fiercely articulated in Palantir co-founder Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s manifesto, The Technological Republic. Karp mourns the collapse of Western ambition, lamenting an engineering elite trapped in a “thin utilitarianism” — building addictive social media and delivery apps instead of solving the hard problems of civilisation. He argues for a new alliance between the state and software industry to reboot the West.

Yet, beyond energy abundance, fully automated industry, and unstoppable militaries, the Prometheans lack a vision of culture. The more trad ones say we can choose to re-engage in Western traditions. The progressives focus more on growing the pie to distribute goods. But what should this future look and feel like? Why are we doing all this? Do we want energy abundance, dark factories, and robot militaries, just so we can go back to mindless slop consumption?

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Even Karp, unusual in Silicon Valley for his philosophy PhD from Goethe University, acknowledges the problem:

“Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies and values in organising the efforts of a people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience. The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks, but the rejection of any form of life in common does as well. The reconstruction of a technological republic in the United States and elsewhere will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.”

Nevertheless, this nod to shared culture lacks bite. Re-embracing a Western canon of shared texts, values, traditions, and rituals is easier said than done. Without reopening the endless debate of what constitutes “canon”, the real problem is that the social ecosystems and infrastructure that once enabled a canon to shape minds have been scrambled.

As Tanner Greer has argued, the technologists of earlier industrial revolutions were animated by more than a love of money and a reading list. In the United States, industrialists “demanded coor­dinated action across economic, political, social, and cultural fronts.” To cultivate the flame of their revolutionary cultures, industrialists built institutions that rooted wealth and expertise in a shared national project: from Protestant civic culture and Union League clubs to elite schools, Ivy League colleges, and engineering societies that forged a techno-national elite.

Despite its aristocratic flavour of hierarchy, Britain followed a similar pattern. Its industrialists built both ambitious firms and moral worlds. Henry Tate, the literal sugar daddy industrialist, transformed wealth into culture, founding the Tate Gallery in 1897 to elevate cultural enrichment and taste. Meanwhile textile magnate Titus Salt’s Saltaire and chocolate king Henry Cadbury’s Bournville represented an attempt to build healthy, flourishing communities around the principles of self-advancement. We may laugh at such high-handed visions — or suspect the motives of those who advanced them — but still. Can you imagine a contemporary tech founder proposing anything remotely similar?

In focusing on power alone, Prometheans risk falling into the same trap as Arcadians: cosplaying the past with no sense of the deep interrelation of culture, politics, and techno-industrial progress. What matters is not rebuilding the institutions of yesterday but decoding what functions culture must serve in the future, and how ideas from the past can be revitalised, reimagined, or forged anew within institutions capable of sustaining them.

Reindustrialisation is meaningless without an optimistic and popular future to build towards. A pure worship of computation and power offers, at best, a sterile utopia, and at worst, a narrow Nietzschean framework that prizes brute strength above all else. We need economic and technological dynamism — but we also need soul.

Perhaps this is where the Arcadians have something valuable to contribute. If the Prometheans wish to destroy the slop machine by building a harder, better physical world, maybe the Arcadians can enchant it. But where do we find the binding myths and practices to forge a cultural foundation for the Age of AI? How do we reconnect with our roots while unleashing dynamism?

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Towards a rooted dynamism

Currently, the marketplace of ideas is highly theoretical. Andrew Bennett’s Sovereign Albion project seeks to revive a shared cultural framework rooted in deep British folklore, while also pursuing AI sovereignty and energy abundance. Meanwhile, various strains of Anglofuturism promote an archeo-futurist dream of small modular reactors, village cricket, and thatched roofs.

But for now, much of this remains trapped in the realm of ideas. Vibes are not enough; we must make the word flesh. Ideas may change the world, but to make meaning, they need to be seen and touched.

The Victorian polymath John Ruskin understood this better than anyone. For Ruskin, buildings were not merely structures but physical manifestations of moral philosophies. In The Stones of Venice, he argued that architecture reveals the inner life of a civilisation: its ideas of the good life, its hierarchies, its sense of beauty. Ruskin defended Gothic revival architecture, arguing that rather than being twee and nostalgic, it was a rebellion against the efficiency-obsessed culture of Victorian industrial capitalism. Gothic revivalism, by contrast, embodied human imperfection, craftsmanship, and dignity.

Contemporary culture is similarly obsessed with optimisation. But where Victorian industrialism produced the factory town, today’s forces are globalisation and high-tech capitalism. Soulless neo-modernist towers of glass and steel stand as monuments to a placeless world optimised for capital and mobility over roots. Ruskin diagnosed the spiritual cost of industrial modernity, but reviving Gothic today could never fully answer the problem once steel, concrete, globalisation, and high-tech culture reshaped the world. The deeper question remains: how can a civilisation become modern without becoming placeless?

Written over four decades ago, architectural critic Kenneth Frampton’s seminal 1983 essay, Towards a Critical Regionalism, offers a path through the Arcadia-Prometheus maze. Drawing on the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, Frampton highlighted the defining cultural tension of our time: “How to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilisation and take part in universal civilisation.” Frampton offered a blueprint for navigating this exact tension. He argued that we must fiercely reject both the sterile, placeless monoculture of globalised modernism and the sentimental, kitsch cosplay of historical nostalgia. Instead, we must harness the universal power of modern engineering and technology, while remaining rooted in the local topography, climate, light, and tectonic traditions of its specific place. It is a demand to use the machine to honour the local.

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Today, this philosophy inspires some of the most compelling architecture in Britain. We see it in Witherford Watson Mann’s Stirling Prize-winning work at Astley Castle, where ancient, ruined masonry is seamlessly fused with ultra-modern glass, timber, and brickwork. We see it in Niall McLaughlin’s New Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which marries modern environmental engineering with centuries-old structural timber traditions, seamlessly blending in next to the neo-classical Pepys Library, its considerably older brother. Both blend technological and material innovation with the deep wisdom of heritage, culture, and aesthetics.

This dynamic fusion need not be limited to architecture. Several maverick technologists and makers around the world are rallying around an emerging new approach to design, aesthetics, and manufacturing that brings the Arcadian spirit of heritage craft together with the cutting edge of Promethean technology, fusing the best insights and capabilities of both to develop things that are not only useful and beautiful, but scalable. Their work falls into four paradigms of what I call “artisanal intelligence”: resurrecting lost styles, augmenting struggling crafts, pushing aesthetic frontiers, and scaling the genius of craft into entirely new domains.

Some are reviving dormant aesthetics for a mass audience. Not Quite Past uses generative AI to design personalised delftware and chinoiserie-inspired ceramics, digitally printed in Stoke-on-Trent, Britain’s pottery heartlands, making a dying aesthetic once reserved for the wealthy accessible to all.

Others use technology to augment crafts on the brink of extinction. Monumental Labs pairs CNC-milling robots with stonemasons to produce ornate statues and facades, absorbing the apprentice toil that is no longer sustainable. Meanwhile Sony has trained AI on centuries of Japanese archives to generate new, structurally complex kimono weaves for master artisans to execute.

Others push aesthetic frontiers altogether unreachable by just hand. At Shanghai’s Chi-Se gallery, Archi-Union programmed robotic arms to salvage and re-lay recycled bricks with inhuman precision, generating a fluid, undulating façade whose curves draw on the ornamental tradition of jali brickwork, a form that could never have been achieved by conventional masonry.

Finally, there are those that are transcending traditional craft logics and aesthetics by unlocking their deeper logic and pushing them into entirely new domains. Petit Pli merges the ancient geometry of origami with advanced materials science to create children’s garments that grow alongside the child.

This virtuous fusion of heritage craft and cutting-edge technology is more than an aesthetic choice but a path to a glorious, techno-crafted future. A future with a soul, even. Empowering craftsman-technologists to unleash this artisanal intelligence to build the magical products, processes, and industries of tomorrow is essential. Indeed, the digital age itself was born from the workshop: the modern computer would not exist without the Jacquard loom, where the ancient craft of textile weaving birthed the concept of programmable punched cards. What other world-changing innovations might we unlock by bringing the invisible wisdom of master craft to the bleeding edge of the technological frontier?

Today, however, the tech elite defaults to a deracinated, placeless approach to design and innovation, while traditional makers remain deeply sceptical of the machine. These two worlds need not be at war. As Askonas argues, the machine has no innate tradition — it must be given one. Following Simone Weil, Askonas argues the future relies on an act of enracinement, or intentional re-rooting — refracting innovation through active participation in a community that preserves ancestral treasures to anchor our placeless technologies in local, material culture.

A vision of how this might look in a British context is found in historian Alexander Langland’s 2017 book Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. Examining King Alfred the Great’s ninth-century translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Langlands notes that cræft — the forefather of today’s “craft” — rarely meant simply “handmade.” Rather, in contexts ranging from statecraft to navigation, cræft referred to the virtuous application of power, skill, and knowledge to forge excellence. As Langlands writes, Alfred used it to translate the Latin concept of virtus into an Anglo-Saxon context. Cræft blended moral excellence, power, and capability into “an almost undefinable sense of knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness.” It was not simply the physical labour of hands — but a profound, embodied coordination of the hand, eye, and mind, representing a state where physical execution and deep intellectual ingenuity are at one.

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This older, deeper definition of cræft is what we must recover in the age of AI. “In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool,” Marx argued in Das Kapital, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”

In previous Industrial Revolutions, the factory liquidated the cræft of the weaver and the smith, replacing the dynamism of what David Pye calls the “workmanship of risk” with a “workmanship of certainty,” where inputs and outcomes were entirely predetermined. In a mature industrial society, whether producing a chair or a SaaS tool, certainty is baked into the system. The human exists simply to ensure the machine does not jam.

While AI, as the ultimate machine of prediction, could be the apotheosis of this logic, it cannot replace the hazardous magic of genuine creativity. Such work is more than pattern recognition and regurgitation, but an exercise in restraint, deep storied insight, and cræft.

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To catalyse this, we need maker-technologists to embrace a new vision of the workmanship of risk — where the CNC mill, 3D printer, and AI-powered software handle the tedious toil to unleash deeper creative work. We already see this in Monumental Labs’ delegation of rough cuts to robots. Meanwhile, facing a shortage of apprentices, luthiers are turning to CNC mills to raise their ambition, making kooky new types of stringed instruments that were previously too risky to attempt. It is in this bold synthesis of artificial and artisanal intelligence that the future of humane, cultural excellence lies.

Where do we go from here? The opportunity is vast, but action is more limited. If we want to tame the Slopbeast and root our future technologies, we must refuse to be trapped cosplaying in Arcadia, nor should we blindly worship the brute power of Prometheus. Rather than succumb to the AI fruit slop, the builders of the future must unleash the spirit of artisanal intelligence and breathe meaning into the machine. It’s time to cræft.

Britain needs its luxury class

It’s an idyllic Friday in Spring and I am standing on the factory floor of a silk factory in the heart of Suffolk. Guiding me through this labyrinth of looms is Julius Walters, the 10th-generation Managing Director of Sudbury Silk Mills, a world-leading purveyor of fine silks to both fashion and literal royalty. “Our customers are focused on doing things exceptionally and beautifully,” Walters tells me over the thrum of his weavers. “It’s part of their philosophy to buy the very best materials — and they view us as the epitome of the best.”

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Q&A with Vanessa Hogge

How would you describe your practice?
I’m a ceramicist, working in porcelain and trying to master its little foibles. It’s taken me many years to work out how best to use it. They say it has a memory, and it can crack. If you’ve mistreated it when you’re working with it and you see a little crack and you cover that over, that’ll resurface in the firing for sure. It’ll come out. So you have to really treat it well and respect it. There are so many different processes involved in making one thing.

What’s the hardest thing about working with porcelain?
You can’t rush it. You need to wait for it to settle, sometimes overnight. These petals can’t be made if the clay is too hard or too dry. It’s all a matter of timing, and that’s what I really love about it all. I haven’t mastered it yet, actually — it’s an ongoing learning curve. But it really is something I couldn’t live without now. I just love it.

Is there a moment in the process you’re most drawn to?
I don’t ever want it to dry out and lose this. This is when it’s at its absolute best. There’s something horrible about it when it’s bone dry — but people love permanence, I suppose.

Why flowers and petals? Where does that attraction to natural forms come from?
Flowers and petals just lend themselves so beautifully to ceramics. It’s just a lump of clay and you put it in the palm of your hand and squish it a bit, and it somehow resembles a petal.

There’s a more fundamental love of gardens and gardening and flowers that existed in my family — a matriarchal gang of women who were big gardeners, and really into all the things that women did at that time: embroidery, knitting, crochet, making things.

It was all about craft and things made in the home. I love all that myself. I spend a lot of time at home making. Once I get home from here, I’m always knitting or making blankets. I just always have to be making, have my hands busy the whole time. I think a lot of ceramicists are quite like that, actually.

Does where you work matter to your practice?
It’d be impossible to work in a silo on your own in the middle of nowhere. Being in London is just so exciting — everything it has to offer. Being able to nip out to see a show, get some inspiration, get into the V&A. I just love sitting here watching the trains go by. There’s the DLR and these trains that come in from Kent into London Bridge — I’ve become a bit of a train spotter. At one open studio, someone came in and said they’d seen me from the train. Sometimes the train driver even toots.

This week, a roundup:

1. Sotheby’s (book tickets)

2. Papermakers of the Lake District (watch here)

3. Boxer shorts (buy here)

4. Anglofuturism (listen here)

5. Cræft x Anthony Scaramucci (listen here)

6. Elle Magazine (listen here)

7. London Craft Week Picks

1. Sotheby’s Panel

On Saturday 16th May I will be on a panel entitled The Future of Craft: How do we keep vital skills alive? at Sotheby’s as part of their London Craft Week festival.

I will be speaking alongside Daniel Carpenter (Executive Director of Heritage Crafts), Lucy Browne (CEO of the Hugo Burge Foundation), and James Haldane (Editor of Sotheby’s Magazine).

For a discounted ticket use the code SOTHEBYS50. Booking here.

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2. Papermakers of the Lake District

Our latest film Papermakers of the Lake District that tells the story of James Cropper Plc and the Paper Foundation is now out. It has been tearing it up on X, but you can watch it in a more beautiful 16:9 aspect ratio here. Even better if you watch it on TV to appreciate Christian Cargill’s exceptional filmcræft.

It’s a delightful Sunday evening watch.

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3. Boxers

Before there was The Cræft Prize — or indeed a film series — Nation of Artisans started as a quest to make some fine boxershorts.

They are now live for pre-order and you can buy some here:

Buy The Boxers

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4. Anglofuturism, Part II

Amid the onslaught of updates, you may have missed that part two of my interview with Tom Ough and Calum Drysdale on the Anglofuturism podcast went live last week.

Anglofuturism

054. Louis Elton: Anglofuturist aesthetics beyond podcræft

Part two begins, as promised, with Louis pulling down his trousers. The underpants in question — a toile de joie printed with pastoral scenes labelled Seductio, Commiditas, Protectio — turn out to be the origin story of the entire British Cræft Prize. What started as a quest to produce bespoke boxer shorts from Northern Irish linen eventually mutated in…

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4 months ago · Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale, and Aeron Laffere

The episode explores: The boxer shorts to national prize pipeline, via Saint Pantalone; Why Irish linen is grown in Flanders; The 16 Dreams of Britain and whether they can coexist; Calum’s objection: competing aesthetic universes cannot be synthesised by goodwill; Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism and Paul Ricœur’s defining question; Hiroki Azuma’s database animals and the collapse of the grand narrative; The Magdalene College library debate: homage or imposition?; Much more…

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5. The Cræft Prize on Scaramucci x Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future

In a recent interview between Anthony Scaramucci and Jimmy McLoughlin on Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, Jimmy kindly gave the prize a plug — and who knows… perhaps The Mooch listened to the episode… a boy can dream.

Listen here on Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts):

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6. The Cræft Prize in Elle

Do androids dream of electric kilns?

I was delighted to discover that Aoife Leach Managing Director of London Craft Week featured The British Cræft Prize in her preview of the upcoming week. Read the full article here.

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7. London Craft Week

London Craft Week starts tomorrow. I will be zooming around the city visiting several exhibitions and events. If you are around, I’d be delighted to meet.

I will be at (most of) the below, and more:

• Launch + House & Garden Craft Prize at Sotheby’s (Monday)

• Crafted at Sotheby’s (All week)

• Making Matters: London Craft Week 2026 Symposium (Wednesday)

• Soane Britain’s Weavers in Residence (Wednesday)

• Slow Ways: Our Common Ground at Art’otel Hoxton (All week)

• Curated Ceramics at Sotheby’s (Auction on Thursday)

• TOAST Presents at New Makers 2026 at Old Sessions House (Thursday)

• Festival of Craft at Sotheby’s (Saturday)

• Future Craft at Battersea Power Station (All week)

• The Art of Making at the Art Worker’s Guild (Saturday-Sunday)

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Enough updates for today. It’s a busy time.

Today, I am delighted to share Papermakers of the Lake District — a new film, a written dispatch, and a labour of love.

I first discovered James Cropper Plc and the Paper Foundation in 2024. After meeting Mark Cropper, the mill’s 6^th-generation proprietor, I was utterly enthralled by its story.

Indeed, the interplay between craft, industry, and innovation is the foundational idea behind the launch of Nation of Artisans.

Yet, my love for the mill only grew after finally visiting. Indeed, it was on the treacherous, rainy drive back down to London from Burneside last December, as I ruminated on the interlooping, creative power of craft and cutting edge that the idea for The British Cræft Prize started to clarify in my mind.

To work with Christian Cargill bringing this to life has been a total joy. Further, I am utterly in debt to Mark, Tom Frith-Powell, Mandy Clement and everyone at James Cropper Plc and the Paper Foundation for letting me into their world so I can tell their story.

Now, the wonder of Cropper is immortalised in this film and the essay below.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

— Louis Elton, founder of Nation of Artisans

Papermakers of the Lake District

It all began with some good old-fashioned incest. All the best businesses do.

Long before James Cropper Plc was a renowned paper and advanced materials factory, it was first a plucky young Quaker’s elaborate ploy to woo his cousin. In 1842, the original James Cropper, just nineteen, proposed to his cousin Fanny Alison Wakefield. His family were not best pleased.

Determined to get closer to Fanny, he left his wealthy industrialist family in Liverpool for a small Cumbrian village called Burneside. Nestled on the Lake District’s majestic River Kent, then the home of 57 paper mills, he decided to buy one and launch a career as a paperman.

Young James was not at all interested in paper. Later in life he confessed to his grandchildren: “In truth, the whole aim of my life, since I was seventeen, was to win your grandmother’s love and make her my wife.”

Yet what started as a love story became a remarkable business. Today, James Cropper Plc is the only remaining fine paper mill in Britain. Six generations of Croppers and 175 years later, Burneside remains a sleepy village with fewer than two thousand inhabitants, yet James Cropper Plc is something of a powerhouse: the business turns over £100 million a year and employs 500 people.

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In a world where tech bros and environmentalists have mounted a pincer campaign against paper, Cropper’s remains mighty and defiant. Though likely unaware, everyone in Britain has been touched by James Cropper. From school exercise books and remembrance poppies to beautifully packaged luxury goods and mounted pictures, Cropper’s paper is omnipresent. So are its advanced materials. If you’ve sat on a plane, taken the bus, or used electricity generated by a wind turbine, Cropper has shaped your life.

But what is paper, really?

Standing in a cowshed on the edge of his garden, Mark Cropper, a sixth-generation papermaker and the business’s current chairman, runs his hand through a sink filled with a translucent milky-white liquid. “It’s nothing,” he says. “Yet if I take this mould — which is effectively Chinese two-thousand-year-old technology, made of wire and wood — and go in here… within seconds the pulp and water become paper. There’s no other chemistry involved.”

“When you witness paper being made,” Mark says, “it’s like seeing magic happening. How you take, almost by a miracle, this slurry of water and plant, and within seconds turn it into the most versatile and useful material, perhaps, there’s ever been. It is this incredible gift that nature has given us — really nothing more than plant and water.”

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Deindustrialisation has hollowed out British manufacturing, while computers have rendered paper almost irrelevant. How on Earth has James Cropper survived?

The answer lies in the business’s founding philosophy: if you keep it in the family, do what you do out of love, connect dots across disciplines, and never shy away from pursuing creative, niche routes out of sticky problems, you can survive anything.

From catastrophe to colour

James eventually married Fanny in 1845. Yet, just a few years into his papermaking career, disaster struck. Once upon a time, paper was made from discarded rags. The rag-and-bone man would collect surplus linen and cotton fabric to be pulped and transformed into paper. The industrial revolution sparked a paper boom, but success almost triggered its own demise. “With the mechanisation of the paper industry, there simply was not enough raw material left, because before that date all the paper in Europe was made from waste rags,” says Mark. “But by the 1850s there simply wasn’t enough of it, and wood pulp, which everybody equates with paper, had not yet been invented.”

With doom on the horizon, the original Cropper, unable to make clean white paper, decided to pivot. “We bought in any old source of dirty fibre — we couldn’t make white paper with it,” Mark explains. Taking inspiration from the emerging dye industry, Cropper bought in samples of the world’s first artificial dye — mauve, invented in 1856 — and started dyeing dirty fibre into coloured paper.

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That first great niche put James Cropper on the map, and still stands the business in good stead today. Cropper’s is now one of, if not the, greatest coloured paper makers in the world. A tour of the factory quickly reveals that countless luxury brands from all over the world are indebted to Cropper’s mastery of colour.

High-end packaging is both an art and a science. For brands that promise excellence at every touchpoint, colour is everything. The sun, however, is a beastly enemy. Brands may invest millions in trademarking a specific shade, but UV light doesn’t care. With just a few hours of exposure, it can break the spell by discolouring the packaging. Cropper’s 175 years of expertise in the chemistry of coloured paper has led to ingenious ways of managing the way colour degrades. This, and countless other innovations, have made Cropper the world’s go-to destination for luxury packaging.

By embracing this tightly bound circuit of craft, industry, and innovation, Cropper has been able to consistently forge excellent products and shake off one crisis after another. “Since the early days of the business,” Mark says, “we’ve always pursued niches, always pursued the latest market, the latest technology. I think that’s one of the key reasons we’re still here.”

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Zigging against the zag

Having warded off the great rag shortage of the 1850s, Cropper continued the tradition of transcending crises by zigging where all others zagged. Fast forward more than a hundred years to the 1980s, and Cropper faced another upheaval. With the dawn of the neoliberal era, deregulation and the widespread offshoring of British manufacturing, the previous generation of Croppers looked at the creaking factory and resisted the winds of global capital.

Like many Croppers before them, they refused to dine out on the genius of the past. Ignoring the prevailing wisdom, they doubled down on Burneside and bet everything on modernisation — even to the point of madness. “In my father’s time, they spent over £40 million in the 1980s rebuilding the whole factory,” Mark explains. “The business at the time was worth less than £10 million, and all of it was borrowed at a time of high interest rates. Everybody thought it was crazy.”

Yet that galactic investment bought the future of the company. Touring the factory, Mark explains that its extraordinarily complex, labyrinthine plumbing and wiring is the business’s great defensive moat. “You simply could not replicate it. It has taken generations to create this place. Even if a billionaire, or the Chinese government, decided they wanted to replicate what James Cropper does, they couldn’t. It would just cost too much.”

This great complexity is evidence of the power of multi-generational businesses, but also the seed of potential tragedy. “When they go, you can’t do it again,” Mark says, mourning the loss of other great foundational industries. “You cannot bring an industry back from extinction. You can’t just grow it overnight.”

Contrary to what the neoliberal economists and management consultants would no doubt have advocated — unbundling, offshoring, optimising each part separately — Cropper’s tightly integrated circuit of craft and manufacturing has been a boon for innovation. Not only was the great rebuild an investment in the core business, it also fostered expansion into the then-uncharted waters of advanced materials.

A material revolution

In 1982, as the factory was being reborn, one of Cropper’s directors, John Larking, was on an aeroplane and happened to sit next to a man who had just received a grant to build a carbon fibre factory. “Carbon fibre was a new-fangled thing that people didn’t quite know what to do with, but they knew it was useful.” Larking wondered: could they make paper out of it?

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Yet while paper is plant fibre cellulose bonded by water, carbon fibre does not bond so easily. So Larking went into a lab with another director, Nick Willink, and secretly they made sheets of carbon fibre by hand. “They tried lots of different binders until they found one that worked.” Then, Mark explains, “they sent that sheet off to a materials laboratory in Durham to be tested, and it had all these amazing properties: it could conduct, it could insulate, it could shield against different spectrums of electromagnetic interference. It had all these wonderful things. And then what they did was adapt a papermaking machine — entirely their own creation.”

Today, that invention is extraordinarily valuable — to the business, but also to material innovation across a variety of industries. “If a piece of photocopier paper is 80 grams per square metre,” Mark lights up, “we can make a material down to 1 gram per square metre.” It is so light it can float on the heat rising off your hand.

These properties have remarkable real-world value for the industries of tomorrow. “Our materials are in about 80% of all modern composite aircraft. We have materials that go into wings to dissipate a lightning strike on an aeroplane. We make a similar material that goes into wind turbine blades for the same job. We have materials used for insulation in aircraft cabins. Our materials have even been used in Formula One.” One day, they could even shield future data centres in space from solar flares.

Mandy Clement, who has spent nearly twenty years at the company and now runs innovation for the Advanced Materials division, is constantly delighted by spotting James Cropper in the wild. “There’s a saying that we’re only so many metres away from a James Cropper product in whatever we do,” she says. An avid cyclist and owner of a carbon fibre road bike, she is pretty sure James Cropper materials are in it. “Every time I ride it, I think: oh yeah, I put this in here!” “You won’t see it,” she says, “but it will be around you.”

Countercultural craft conservation

Yet while Cropper may be incubating the cutting-edge materials of tomorrow, it is Mark’s work on the heritage crafts of the past that is arguably the family’s most counterculturally pioneering project. Across the world, the traditional craft of handmade paper is collapsing. With paper mills closing due to falling demand, and an ageing generation of master papermakers retiring without successors, Mark sensed an opportunity to rejuvenate the craft for the twenty-first century.

“While wanting to take the advanced materials business into the future, I’ve also been led back into the past, back to the craft that created the industry.” When he moved back to Burneside from London thirteen years ago, Mark sensed the village needed revitalisation. The industry, and society itself, had become entirely detached from the craft of paper. Animated by a desire to celebrate paper and reconnect the mill with the village, Mark launched the Cropper family’s latest niche innovation: the Paper Foundation.

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Starting with an old shed at the back of his house, Mark launched the Foundation in 2016. He had acquired the equipment of Griffin Mill in Ireland — a Royal Warrant-holding handmade paper mill that was closing without a successor. Soon after he enlisted Tom Frith-Powell, a former employee of Damien Hirst as the Foundation’s first apprentice.

Tom moved to Burneside in 2019 and learned traditional techniques from retiring master papermakers in Ireland. Then as Covid-19 struck, he continued his apprenticeship over Zoom, spending each day making paper and posting samples to Ireland for critique, improving batch by batch. It was the only way to learn a craft for which no formal apprenticeships exist.

The Foundation quickly won a series of fascinating commissions — developing paper wall lights for Lulu Lytle’s Soane Britain in collaboration with the Japanese artist Kuniko, as well as a special watermarked edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In just a few years, the Foundation has built up an impressive client base: the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have since turned Soho House’s old bedsheets into stationery for all their hotels — and done the same for various paper connoisseurs who cannot be named.

The Paper Foundation, now itself a Royal Warrant holder, is technically a separate charity from James Cropper Plc. In practice, it is the living proof of the thesis that craft, industry, and innovation are deeply entangled — their value springing not just from resisting the globalised managerial impulse to break up the co-location of design and manufacture, but from the active investment in fostering the continuum between heritage craft and cutting edge. As Tom puts it: “what’s unique about this village is that you can follow papermaking from how it was done in the twelfth century to how it’s being done in the twenty-first. That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”

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For Mark, the Foundation started as a quest for a more intimate connection to paper, one he had previously lacked: “The business was there, but I couldn’t honestly say, ten or twenty years ago, that I had a visceral connection to my industry. I now do. Because I think when you understand where something has come from — if you understand the craft — I think you understand the cutting edge. And I think the joy for me is mixing that all together.”

As his knowledge of the craft grows, it sharpens his appreciation of the deep entanglement. “The craft of yesterday is actually the industry of today and tomorrow. That’s lost on people because they simply don’t understand how things are made. But very, very often there is that absolute direct link.”

Walking through the advanced materials lab, Mark stops to watch a team slowly unwinding a roll of carbon fibre material bound for an aerospace application, picking out impurities with a scalpel — the same gesture, performed with the same delicacy, as the Foundation’s papermakers removing flaws from handmade sheets with a razor blade a kilometre up the road. Two thousand years of papermaking history, expressing itself identically, with completely different purposes. “You’ve got this ancient material and absolute cutting edge,” he says, “and yet the kind of attention, the kind of love that’s being put into it — it’s the same thing. Even where you deploy science at the cutting edge, you still need art. That to me is the extraordinary thing.”

The Don Quixote of Paper?

In an age of AI maximalism, is Mark Cropper the tragic modern-day Don Quixote of paper, a noble knight defending its virtues in a world that no longer needs it?

No. Almost a decade into his conquest, the Paper Foundation’s mission is starting to look increasingly sensible. “I think paper has been given an unfair reputation. In the last ten, fifteen years, we’ve all been actively encouraged to embrace digital media like nothing else and use less and less paper. There have been campaigns saying paper has a footprint, it’s environmentally bad, you should use less of it.” But Mark thinks the tide may be turning: “what we’re realising now is that actually the digital world carries perhaps an even bigger footprint — almost unfathomable. And right now, that is not just environmental. It’s actually almost biological. We’re beginning to understand that the screen and the habits being fostered in us from childhood are having a real impact on the wiring of our brains, on our mental health. These are really significant things.”

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While scores of thinkers and writers from Jonathan Haidt to James Marriott mourn the smartphone revolution and its consequences — the collapse of reading and the dawn of the post-literate society — Mark is surprisingly hopeful: “What is humbling and exciting for me is that a lot of what we all need to do, myself, our schools, our children, is actually to get back to paper. Because whether you are reading, writing, or drawing on paper, you are not feeling all those potential negative impacts of the digital world. You have a medium that is the gift of concentration. You can’t swipe a piece of paper. The pace of it is your pace. You’re not overstimulated. Your imagination is running at a far more steady, healthy speed. People have forgotten that’s even available to them. This is not anti-digital. Digital tools are incredible. But when it comes to how we use our time as human beings on this planet, I think we should have less time on screens and more on paper.”

James Cropper and the Paper Foundation’s continued success is the perfect rebuttal to the consultants, economists, and techno-utopians who would have rendered both obsolete. In a moment where AI threatens to hollow out Britain’s service economy and screens erode what remains of our shared culture, Burneside offers a different model. Interdependent with nature, nourished across generations, and igniting its greatest innovations by connecting the past with the future, Cropper’s offers an enchanted vision of the best that a British business can be. Both defiantly rooted and boldly inventive, stewards of heritage and trailblazers of the future, infinitely plucky and willing to make big bets to forge the world of their dreams — whether it’s developing the materials of the future, reviving the craft of the past, or simply chasing the forbidden fruit of love.

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Credits

Created & Exec Produced by Louis Elton
Directed & Cinematography by Christian Cargill
Produced by Dalmatian Films
Edited by Tom Gilfillan
Colourist – Nathaniel Skeels
Edit producer – Luke Spencer
Production Assistant - Hugo Williams-Ellis
Post production by The Shop

Part two of the interview is now live. Long-time readers will be delighted to hear that, during the episode, I debuted Nation of Artisans’ first ever merchandise: some magnificent boxer shorts.

Buy The Boxers

After a year of R&D with the artist J.G. Fox and fashion designer Gemma Harrison, the finest boxer shorts of the 21st century are finally here. Designed and cræfted right here in Britain.

If you’ve been following from long before the prize and indeed the films, you’ll be aware of my long fascination with designing very interesting boxers (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Buy The Boxers

The Boxers

But enough talk, behold!

Buy The Boxers 🇬🇧

Order yours here:

• Buy for Britain 🇬🇧

• Buy for Europe 🇪🇺

• Buy for the Rest of the World 🌍

Sizes

The Boxer Lore

They are £50.00 plus shipping.

Certainly not cheap. They cost £43.50 to make here in the UK, before a penny of design work is counted. And that’s only possible because J.G. Fox generously donated his drawing — without him, the numbers wouldn’t work at all.

A note on how this works: each pair is made to order. The first batch closes once 100 orders are in, at which point I place the bulk run with the factory and the boxers ship out together. Please allow a few weeks from there to your doormat — this is cræft, not Amazon Prime.

Nation of Artisans stands to make a sizeable loss on these pants. (Unless they go viral and sell thousands 🙏). Their creation was an act of love, and you too can participate in the magic of the pants. You are buying more than a pair of boxer shorts, you are buying a work of art and a part of my soul.

A year ago, I shared the brief with the maverick artist and friend J.G. Fox, who transformed my vision into a wonderful design. Gemma Harrison then turned the artwork into a wearable garment.

You should buy them for all your friends and family. I can’t tell you how much cultural capital comes from owning these boxer shorts!

Buy The Boxers 🇬🇧

The Virtues of Boxers (2025) by J.G. Fox

Inspired by the patron saint of underwear, Saint Pantaleon, and his commedia dell’arte avatar Pantalone, Fox presents five of the great virtues of boxers:

1. Protectio (protection) — boxers as a bullfighting muleta.

2. Commoditas (comfort) — boxers as the ultimate vessel for relaxation.

3. Modestia (modesty) — boxers as the last defence against immodesty.

4. Sustentatio (sustentation) — boxers as originally intended 🥊.

5. Seductio (seduction) — boxers as a tool for seduction.

A scattering of delightful rogue cherubs, wielding rogue boxers of their own, completes the scene.

The first batch closes at 100 orders. If you’d like to be included, claim a pair now. Buy them for all your friends. They are unisex.

Buy for Britain 🇬🇧 · Europe 🇪🇺 · Rest of the World 🌍

Thank you to , , and for offering me the chance to debut these pants to the world.

Prize

Now I know most of you are subscribed because of the £60,000 Cræft Prize. Fear not, we will return to normal service soon — but if you are interested in more than the prize… then perhaps you should buy the boxers for yourself, or your loved ones. The more the better.

Buy for Britain 🇬🇧 · Europe 🇪🇺 · Rest of the World 🌍

Good Enough for King Alfred

🇬🇧 UK — boxers £50 + £3.99 P&P https://buy.stripe.com/dRm5kE3KV2ExgnS9NfabK01

🇪🇺 Europe (EU + EEA + Switzerland) — boxers £50 + £8.99 P&P https://buy.stripe.com/aFadRa81b7YRefK9NfabK02

🌍 International (US, CA, AU, NZ, JP, etc. — 34 countries) — boxers £50 + £12.99 P&P https://buy.stripe.com/aFadRa1CNenfc7C5wZabK03

And of course, here is Episode 2

Anglofuturism

054. Louis Elton - Aesthetics beyond podcræft

Part two begins, as promised, with Louis pulling down his trousers. The underpants in question — a toile de joie printed with pastoral scenes labelled Seductio, Commiditas, Protectio — turn out to be the origin story of the entire British Cræft Prize. What started as a quest to produce bespoke boxer shorts from Northern Irish linen eventually mutated in…

Listen now

4 months ago · Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale, and Aeron Laffere

Anglofuturism

#053 - Louis Elton | Cræft, the antidote to slop

From the King Charles III Space Station — whose thatch is in a worrying state of disrepair — Tom and Calum welcome Louis Elton, founder of the Cræft Prize, a new £60,000 national award for maverick craftsmen, makers and technologists who fuse heritage crafts with cutting-edge technology…

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4 months ago · 3 likes · Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale, and Aeron Laffere

With everyone transfixed by the Artemis Moon mission, few heard the cries of despair coming from the King Charles III Space Station, where the thatched roof is caving in.

Sensing looming doom, its captains and podcræftsmun , , and put out a procurement tender, but no one could answer the call.

With the great Dunachan Mackenzie of Applecross long dead and today’s thatchers overwhelmed with demand but lacking in apprentices — they were in search of a miracle.

Fortunately, I heard the call. I hopped in the Nation of Artisans LignoSat satellite — crafted by master sashimono joiners in Japan without glue or nails — and catapulted my team of crofters to the KCIII to fix it.

With disaster averted, we sat down for a London Pride, some artisanal space-reared lamb, and a chat for the Anglofuturism podcast.

We covered everything from the £60,000 Cræft Prize to the death of the handmade cricket ball. Strap yourselves in.

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts — or indeed podcrafts:

• Spotify

• Substack

• Apple

Subscribe to the Anglofuturism Podcast

#053 - Louis Elton | Cræft, the antidote to slop

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The episode explores:

• The Anglo-Saxon meaning of cræft and why it matters more than craft

• Why the handmade cricket ball is dead and what that tells us about British manufacturing

• AI slop versus cræft as opposing forces in modern culture

• CNC monks, robotic bricklaying, and 3D-printed Cornish lobster pots

• Whether Silicon Valley’s obsession with taste is just pattern recognition

• The trad wife aesthetic as craft pornography

• Iranian AI Lego propaganda as an unlikely signal of the future

• What humans are actually for in a post-AGI world

• The Cræft Prize: £60,000 for inventions that fuse heritage wisdom with frontier technology

On Saturday 16th May, you have the opportunity to witness actually existing cræft in the flesh.

The aesthetes of Sotheby’s have been foolish enough to let me loose at their London Craft Week festival of craft.

I will be on a panel entitled The Future of Craft: How do we keep vital skills alive?

Buy Tickets

I’m delighted to be speaking alongside friend of Nation of Artisans, Daniel Carpenter, the Executive Director of Heritage Crafts, as well as Lucy Browne, CEO of the Hugo Burge Foundation.

Expect big talk on craft, conservation vs revolution, AI, robots, and the mystery of culture.

The panel is being hosted by James Haldane, Editor of Sotheby’s Magazine.

In addition, Sotheby’s are hosting a special day of interactive craft — or indeed cræft — including needlework, leatherwork, roof thatching and much more.

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My cræfted march through the institutions continues.

Since launching The British Cræft Prize last month, many questions have been flying in. In what follows, we attempt to answer your questions. As ever, if you know of anyone who might be interested in submitting to the prize — or indeed partnering with it — share it far and wide.

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What is the British Cræft Prize?

The British Cræft Prize is a £60,000 national award launching in March 2026. It backs serious innovations that combine heritage craft wisdom of the past with advanced technology of the future to solve real-world problems of today.

It exists to demonstrate that Britain can lead in a form of technological progress that is materially intelligent, culturally rooted, and industrially ambitious.

To learn more, read this.

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Who can apply?

Makers, engineers, technologists, architects, designers, researchers, students, startups, in-house innovation teams, or interdisciplinary collaborations.

You do not need to be a British citizen. You do need a genuine connection to Britain, for example living and working here.

If shortlisted, you must be physically present in the UK for meetings, filming, demonstrations, and exhibition. This Prize culminates in real-world outcomes. It is about atoms as well as bits.

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What does ‘cræft’ mean?

Cræft is the old English root of craft. Historically, it referred not just to manual skill, but to the virtuous application of knowledge and power.

It describes work where material, method, place, and purpose align to produce excellence. It is not restricted to hand tools or small-scale making. It is as relevant to robotics, AI, and advanced manufacturing as it is to ceramics or joinery.

To understand the idea more deeply, read Alexander Langlands’ book Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.

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Is this anti-technology?

No. The Prize is explicitly pro-technology, but against slop. Slop is that which is easy to make, easy to consume, and easy to forget. We are interested in excellence. We support innovations that use technology to deepen human capability, beauty, usefulness, and durability rather than automate meaning away.

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Are you trying to kill real handmade crafts?

Absolutely not. In fact, we are not interested in anyone implementing technology to substitute already existing and thriving makers/craftsmen. Rather, we want technology to be used to:

• Revive or resurrect crafts that are struggling — or extend crafts to new levels of complexity that would otherwise not be possible or affordable with existing practices.

• Support crafts that are economically struggling.

• Push crafts to entirely new frontiers, generating new aesthetics, products, forms, worlds!

• Developing entirely new paradigms where you mix and match crafts, tools, practices to generate new possibilities!

To really understand what we are searching for, read about the Four Paradigms of Cræft.

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Is this about nostalgia?

No. This is not a conservation prize. Heritage matters because it contains deep material intelligence and aesthetic understanding. The point is not to preserve the past intact, but to extend it forward using contemporary tools. We are not interested in cosplay traditionalism. We are interested in new value built on old wisdom.

That being said, we love technology being leveraged to scale dying or increasingly unfeasible crafts — provided they can continue to provide meaningful value in people’s lives.

Again read about the Four Paradigms of Cræft to see how we think about history and the future of craft.

What kinds of projects are eligible?

Projects may be:

• A product: a physical artefact that solves a defined problem.

• A method: a redesigned process, system, or supply chain with a demonstrable prototype.

Purely digital projects are permitted only if they demonstrate tangible material value. This Prize is about atoms as well as bits. Craft, manufacturing, and physical reality matter here.

For real world examples of the sorts of things that would win (if they didn’t already exist), read this:

What challenges should my project address?

We are open to all sorts of challenges. While a thirst for aesthetic renewal is at the forefront of the prize’s mission, this can be explored through various other challenges. You could be building things to solve problems that are: cultural, artistic, economic, environmental, infrastructural, psychological, social… the possibilities are endless — provided your specific project is very tangible and clearly defined as a product of technology x craft!

The goal is to inspire harmony: with nature through responsible materials, with each other through work that supports community, and with ourselves through intelligible, durable, and psychologically sustaining objects and systems.

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What stage must projects be at?

Concept-stage proposals are welcome if they can realistically be built.

Finalists must produce something that works. The £5,000 production grant exists to refine, realise, and properly present the project. It is not a feasibility study fund. The winner is likely someone who is ready to scale immediately — and would use the extra £30,000 as rocket fuel to go big.

We reserve the right to reduce the production grant if a project is already sufficiently developed. We also reserve the right to increase the number of finalists if funding and submission quality allow.

Final outcomes must be suitable for public exhibition.

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How do you filter for seriousness and avoid ‘slop’?

All applicants must submit a short video explaining their invention. Video production quality matters, but clarity of thought and material understanding matter more.

We want to see expertise. If you cannot explain what you are building and why it matters, you have not developed it deeply enough.

Physical artefacts are not mandatory at submission stage, but projects that have been pushed materially as far as possible will naturally stand out.

You will also be expected to present your project/invention with some sense of a brand. This is not a dull science show, we want to see a little showmanship. Sell it to us — and the world!

What are the judging criteria?

Entries are judged against six criteria:

1. Ingenuity

2. Cræft depth

3. Beauty

4. Usefulness and scalability

5. Integrity

6. Contribution to future heritage

Judges review entries independently to prevent conformism and groupthink.

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Are you looking for things that are beautiful or useful?

Both. We are inspired by inventions such as CNC robots creating new forms of beautiful housing and Petit Pli’s origami clothing, which is both elegant and practical.

We are equally interested in aesthetic works such as Not Quite Past’s generative AI delftware, where cultural intelligence meets technological possibility.

We want the spirit of William Morris, beauty and usefulness together, and the spirit of Josiah Wedgwood, scaling beauty and utility. We are not looking for one-off labour-intensive pieces. We are looking for the magic of scale.

If you are submitting, ask yourself: how could I create something that creates that unique sense of craftedness at scale? How could I craft something that would have cost a fortune to develop before AI and advanced manufacturing? How could I change the course of the future with one little crafted trick?

How does the funding work?

Six finalists will each receive approximately £5,000 in production funding.

One overall winner receives an additional £30,000.

The £30,000 is unrestricted. We hope it will be used to scale or commercialise the project, but it is not contractually tied to that outcome.

The prize pot may increase if additional sponsorship is secured.

All finalists will also receive a ‘British Cræft’ medal and are profiled through high-quality editorial, film, and exhibition.

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Does the Prize take equity?

No. The Prize does not require equity. In the future, we may explore voluntary value-capture mechanisms to support long-term sustainability, but there is currently no equity requirement.

Who owns the intellectual property?

Applicants retain full ownership of their intellectual property.

Is the Prize political?

The Prize is cultural and industrial, not party-political. It is partnered with the Centre for British Progress, a non-partisan think tank focused on growth and national capability.

The Prize is concerned with capability, innovation, and cultural and national renewal. It is not affiliated with any political party.

Why focus on Britain?

Britain has deep craft traditions and world-leading technological capability.

This is the home of Nation of Artisans. It is a manageable scale — with just a tiny team (of one person), it inconceivable that we could process submissions from all over the world. However, if you have a meaningful connection to Britain and could be her for interviews and submissions, then you are welcome to apply!

This is not a nativist prize. We do not seek craft autarchy! Craft, industry, and innovation have always been global. Crucible steel emerged in India, paper originated in China. We focus on Britain as a starting point. We hope to launch many more prizes in the future with a global vision.

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Is this only for traditional craftspeople?

No. We expect strong entries from makers, engineers, AI researchers, technologists, and industrial designers. We hope to see maker-technologists, engineer-craftsmen, and hybrid teams operating across digital and material domains. The strongest projects will combine both.

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How many finalists will be selected?

Six finalists are planned for the production phase. This may increase depending on funding and submission quality. Equally, if there are not enough high quality submissions, we reserve the right to select fewer than six.

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Will there be an exhibition?

Yes. An exhibition is guaranteed. The question is how big.

Finalists’ work will be presented in a curated public exhibition. Longlisted projects may also feature.

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Is the submission process entirely blind?

No. Unlike books or paintings, this is a new category we are building. There will be ambiguities and growing pains. Entrants are encouraged to clarify questions with the organisers. Dialogue is part of the process. Judging itself is conducted independently, but the overall process is not hermetically sealed. We are building something new, and that requires conversation.

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I know someone who should submit!

Great! Send them the prize!

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Can I participate if I’m under 18?

The British Cræft Prize welcomes applications from young makers and inventors. Applicants must be 13 years of age or older at the time of submission.

If you are under the age of 18, the following conditions apply:

Parental or guardian consent
Applicants aged 13–17 must have the permission of a parent or legal guardian to submit an application. A parent or guardian must review the application and confirm their consent during the submission process.

Participation in the Prize process
If an applicant under 18 is selected for interviews, filming, profiling, exhibition, or any in-person activities related to the Prize, a parent or guardian must be informed and may be required to accompany the applicant where appropriate.

Agreements and documentation
Applicants under 18 cannot enter binding agreements on their own. Any agreements relating to participation in the Prize (including production grants, exhibition agreements, or media releases) must be signed by a parent or legal guardian on their behalf.

Prize funding
If an applicant under 18 is awarded prize funding or a production grant, payment will normally be made to a parent or legal guardian on behalf of the applicant, or to a legal entity approved by the Prize organisers.

Safeguarding and wellbeing
The British Cræft Prize organisers are committed to ensuring that participation by young applicants takes place in a safe and supportive manner. Communication regarding the participation of applicants under 18 may include their parent or guardian where appropriate.

By submitting an application, both the applicant and their parent or guardian confirm that they understand and accept these conditions.

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How can I support the Prize?

Individuals and institutions can support through:

• Sponsorship or philanthropic backing

• Providing an exhibition venue

• Media partnerships

• Strategic introductions

• Institutional partnerships

• Or you could simply become a paid subscriber! If 1000 people were to become paid subscribers, we the prize could be locked in for years to come…

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And if you want to get involved directly, email louis@nationofartisans.com