The Ten-Year Window
I keep doing the maths. I do not want to, but I keep doing it.
If you were born in 1940 and you are alive today, you are eighty-six years old. If you were born in 1935, you are ninety-one. These are the Rememberers - the people who carry in their heads the living memory of an England that no longer exists in any other form. The woman who watched the last horse-drawn plough work her father’s field. The man who can describe the sound a particular bell made before it was recast in 1962. The retired teacher who remembers when the village school had forty children and the pub had a skittle alley and the church had evensong every Sunday and none of those things felt remarkable because they were just how it was.
In ten years, this generation will largely be gone. That is not pessimism. It is demography.
I started this project knowing that, and it has shaped everything about how I work. Not what I photograph or who I approach - those decisions came from the framework, from the six categories, from the question of who is keeping England alive. But the pace, the priorities, the order in which things happen - all of that is driven by a clock I cannot slow down.
The Heritage Crafts Association maintains something called the Red List. It is modelled on the ecological Red Lists that track endangered species, and it works the same way. Crafts are classified as viable, endangered, critically endangered, or extinct. When I first read through it, what struck me was not the number of endangered crafts - though that number is large - but the scale of the numbers within each craft. We are not talking about industries in decline. We are talking about single digits. Three people in England who can make a particular kind of basket. Two people who understand a specific jointing technique. One person - one - who can split stone in a way that a cathedral restoration project requires.
One person. When that person dies, the knowledge does not become rare. It becomes extinct. Not endangered, not recoverable with sufficient funding or interest. Extinct, in the same way a species is extinct. The information leaves the world entirely.
I think about this more than is probably healthy. There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes from knowing you are working against a deadline that is not a deadline in the normal sense - not a date on a calendar, not a grant cycle, not a publisher’s schedule - but a biological fact. People age. People die. And when the last practitioner of a craft dies, or the last person who remembers how a particular village functioned before the bypass was built, what they carried disappears with them. No amount of money or good intentions can bring it back.
This is why two of the six categories - the Rememberers and the Makers - are marked Critical in the project architecture. Not because the others are unimportant. The Keepers, the Carriers, the Stewards, the Gatherers - they all matter, and some of them are elderly too. But the Rememberers and the Makers face a specific and irreversible threat. The Rememberers because memory cannot be inherited, only recorded. The Makers because a craft practiced by three people is three heartbeats from extinction.
I want to be precise about something, because the language matters. What I feel about this project is urgency, not panic. They are different things, and the difference is important.
Panic makes you rush. It makes you grab at everything within reach, make sloppy decisions, cut corners on the work that matters because you are afraid of running out of time. Panic is what happens when you feel the clock but have no plan. I have seen panicked projects. They produce a lot of material and very little of it is any good, because no one stopped long enough to think about what they were actually trying to capture or why.
Urgency is different. Urgency is precise. Urgency says: this person is eighty-seven and she is the last one who saw the thing you need to record, so you go to her first. Not because the thirty-year-old bell ringer is less interesting, but because the bell ringer will still be ringing bells in 2036 and this woman will not. Urgency is triage. It is the discipline of knowing what must happen now and what can wait, and being honest about the difference.
That distinction shaped the entire project schedule. The first year is weighted heavily toward Rememberers and the oldest Makers. Not exclusively - there are Carriers and Keepers in the calendar too, because the seasonal work cannot always wait and because some traditions only happen once a year. Miss the Padstow Obby Oss in May and you have missed it for a year. But when I have a choice between two subjects and one of them is eighty-nine, I go to the eighty-nine-year-old. Every time. That is not a preference. It is an obligation.
There is a version of this project that waits for better funding. There is a version that applies to every available grant, builds a proper institutional partnership, hires a research team, and begins fieldwork in 2028 with everything properly resourced. That version would be better funded. It would also arrive too late for some of the people I need to reach.
I am not being dramatic about this. I have a contact list with seventy-four names on it. Several of those people are in their late eighties. One is ninety-three. I do not know how many of them will be alive in 2028, and neither does anyone else. What I do know is that every year I wait, the list gets shorter. Not might get shorter. Gets shorter. That is the reality of working with an ageing population, and it is the reason I started the project before it was ready in every way I would have liked it to be ready.
The camera equipment is not ideal. The funding is not there. The CIC is newly registered and has no track record. I am doing this with personal savings and whatever credibility thirty years of professional work gives me when I send a cold email. None of that is how I would have drawn it up if I had been given the luxury of designing the perfect starting conditions.
But perfect starting conditions are a fantasy, and fantasies do not make archives. The window is open now. In ten years, for some of these subjects, it will be closed. Not closing - closed. The question is not whether this is the right time to start. The question is whether I can justify waiting, knowing what I know about who I am trying to reach and how old they are.
I cannot.
I think the honest thing to say is that this project frightens me. Not the scale of it, though the scale is large. Not the logistics, though the logistics are genuinely difficult. What frightens me is the possibility of being too late. Of arriving at a farmhouse in Norfolk to find that the man I came to record died in January. Of reading an obituary for a craftsperson I had been meaning to contact and realising that meaning to is not the same as doing it.
That fear is useful, as long as I do not let it become panic. It keeps the priorities clear. It keeps me honest about what matters and what is just comfortable. It is the reason I wake up early and send the emails and make the calls and drive to places I have never been to sit with people I have never met, because the window is open and I do not know for how long.
Ten years. Maybe less. That is what we have.
The work starts now because it has to.