The outreach wave that began in March has settled into something more concrete. Conversations have turned into commitments. Dates are in the diary. Five shoots are now confirmed across four regions, institutional partnerships are formalised, and the book proposal is with a literary agent in six days.
This is the point where the project stops being a plan and starts being a schedule.
The first confirmed shoots
Paul Kemp, millwright - Haddiscoe Island Mill, Norfolk
10 April. Two days from now. Paul is the last working millwright on the Norfolk Broads - maybe the last in East Anglia. Haddiscoe Island is accessible only by a single unmade road that crosses a drainage cut between the Waveney and the Yare. The mill sits alone in the marshland. We arrive at 10:30am. This is a Makers shoot, the first of Year One, and the kind of subject the archive was built for: a person doing skilled physical work in a landscape that has not changed in two hundred years. Bhavani is on field production. We are bringing the Hasselblad and the Intrepid 4x5.
Cardozo Kindersley Workshop - Cambridge
22 April. Lettercutting in stone, glass and metal. The workshop was founded by David Kindersley in 1946 and has operated continuously since, now run by Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley. Seven craftspeople work there, all hammer and chisel, no machines. The work ranges from memorial inscriptions to large-scale architectural lettering. Every letter is drawn by hand before it is cut. This is one of the last workshops of its kind in Europe. Cambridge is an hour from London by train. We have a full day.
Dennett Boat Builders - Thames at Chertsey
23 April. The day after Cambridge. Traditional wooden boat building on the Thames, sixty-five years on the river. The Dennett yard builds and restores clinker-built launches, skiffs, and punts - the kind of craft that defined the upper Thames before fibreglass. The yard is at Chertsey, forty minutes from London by car. Back-to-back shoots on consecutive days will test the workflow. That is deliberate.
Ernest Wright - Sheffield
2 June. A full day in the last remaining hand-made scissors workshop in the West. Ernest Wright has been making scissors in Sheffield since 1902. The putters, the grinders, the assemblers - each pair passes through multiple hands and every stage is done by eye and feel. The Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire made the introduction and has opened the wider Sheffield pipeline, including the Little Mesters - the small independent craftsmen who once filled every courtyard in the city. Sheffield is a critical node for the Makers category. This shoot is the way in.
CJR Heritage - Heart of England
7 August. Traditional timber framing in the Heart of England. CJR work with green oak using joints and methods that predate the industrial revolution - mortise-and-tenon, pegged frames, no steel fixings. They restore medieval barns, build new frames for heritage properties, and train apprentices. The August date puts this in the second field window, after the summer block in July. It extends our confirmed Makers coverage into a fourth region.
Institutional partnerships
Three institutional relationships have formalised since the last entry, each one opening a door that would have taken months to reach through cold outreach alone.
The Heritage Crafts Association has confirmed formal endorsement of the archive. This is the organisation that publishes the Red List of Endangered Crafts and maintains the only comprehensive register of heritage craftspeople in the UK. Their endorsement carries weight with subjects, funders, and press. It also means access to their network - direct introductions to craftspeople across every category.
The British Watchmakers Association has connected the archive into the Allied Trades network - jewellery, silversmithing, engraving, clockmaking - following a UNESCO heritage trades submission that listed several of these crafts as endangered. The connection came through Timothy Puddephatt, former BABA Chairman, who replied to outreach in March. The Allied Trades network gives us a pipeline into London’s specialist workshops that would otherwise be invisible and closed.
The Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire has opened the Sheffield pipeline. The introduction to Ernest Wright came through them. So did the first connections to the Little Mesters - the small independent craftsmen who have worked in Sheffield’s courtyards since the 18th century. The Cutlers’ endorsement means that when we arrive in Sheffield in June, we arrive with credibility already established.
The book
A literary agent meeting is confirmed for 14 April. The book proposal is ready - structure, sample chapter, market positioning, visual strategy. The proposal frames the archive as a three-year documentary project with a publication endpoint: a large-format photobook with extended captions and contextual essays. The meeting is with an agent who represents photography and non-fiction titles. If it lands, the book becomes the project’s anchor publication. If it doesn’t, the proposal is ready for the next conversation.
What’s next
Paul Kemp in two days. Cardozo Kindersley and Dennett back-to-back the following week. The literary agent on the 14th. Then Jack in the Green, Hastings, 4 May - the largest May Day celebration in England and the first date-locked Carriers event of Year One.
The calendar is no longer empty.