Sheffield

The cutlers of Hallamshire worked where the rivers fell fast enough to turn a wheel. By the fourteenth century the trade was organised enough to be regulated, and a Sheffield knife was already a byword for a good blade - Chaucer’s “Sheffeld thwitel” of around 1387 is the first time the city’s cutlery appears in English literature. In 1624 the trade was incorporated by Act of Parliament as the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, with the power to grant and police the marks that makers struck into their steel - the beginning of “Made in Sheffield” as a guarantee.

Sheffield did not just shape steel; it learned to make better steel than anyone. Around 1742 Benjamin Huntsman, working at Handsworth, perfected the crucible process that produced the first consistent cast steel, hard and uniform enough for the finest blades and springs. A century later Henry Bessemer brought his converter to the city in the 1850s, making bulk steel cheap for the first time. The East End filled with melting shops and rolling mills, and the population multiplied. Sheffield became, simply, Steel City.

Underneath the great works, the hand trade ran on the Little Mesters - self-employed master craftsmen who rented space, power and a corner of a bench, and made by hand. A pocket knife might pass through a dozen pairs of specialist hands: forger, grinder, hardener-and-temperer, cutler who put it together, buffer who finished it. The system was efficient and brutal, and it produced craftsmen of extraordinary, narrow brilliance. The last of the old Little Mesters, the pocket-knife maker Stan Shaw, worked into his nineties and died in 2021.

In 1913, looking for a steel that would resist erosion in gun barrels, the metallurgist Harry Brearley added chromium and found that his test pieces would not rust - would not even stain. He had made stainless steel. It was first forged into knives and forks at Portland Works, and within a generation it had remade the cutlery of the entire world. The city that had always made blades now made the metal that every other blade would be made from.

The mass cutlery trade collapsed under foreign competition through the later twentieth century, and with it most of the hand skills. Many of the crafts that built Sheffield - scissor making, folding-knife making, hand forging - now sit on the Heritage Crafts Red List as endangered or critically endangered. But the thread did not break. Firms like Ernest Wright and Joseph Rodgers survived or were revived; new workshops opened at Kelham Island and Portland Works; and a generation of makers chose, against the economics, to learn the old hand processes. They are who this hub is about.