The village where Eric Gill and the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic established an Arts and Crafts community. The craft tradition continues - letterpress printers, weavers, and woodworkers carrying forward a century of making.
Ditchling sits at the foot of the South Downs, a small village with an outsized craft heritage. In 1907, Eric Gill moved here and eventually established the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a community of artists and craftspeople whose work in typography, printmaking, weaving, and woodcarving influenced a generation. The Guild dissolved, but the craft tradition it seeded in Ditchling continues.
The Archive documents the current generation of Ditchling makers - letterpress printers, weavers, woodworkers - who carry forward a tradition rooted in this specific place. The Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft maintains the Guild's legacy, but the living tradition exists in the workshops that still operate in the village. These are Makers whose craft is inseparable from the place where it is practised.