The Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts

If you want to understand how fast England’s craft knowledge is disappearing, the clearest place to start is not with a funeral. It is with a spreadsheet.

The Heritage Crafts Association publishes, every two years, a document called the Red List of Endangered Crafts. It is a register of every traditional craft currently practised in the UK, assessed by how likely each one is to survive to the next generation, categorised by risk level, and updated with new data from hundreds of practitioners and organisations across the country. It is, in the words of the team that produces it, the first research of its kind  -  a systematic, evidence-based attempt to do for craft knowledge what conservation biology does for threatened species: take stock, assign risk, and make visible what is being lost before it is too late to act.

The England Archive uses the Red List as one of its primary working documents. Every craftsperson in our Makers strand is cross-referenced against it. Every region we plan carries notes on which Red List crafts are still practised there. Understanding what the list is, how it is constructed, and what it means is essential context for understanding why this archive exists and what it is trying to do.

The Red List of Endangered Crafts is modelled explicitly on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species  -  the global standard for assessing which animal and plant species are at risk of extinction. The IUCN Red List does not merely note that a species is rare. It classifies it by severity of risk, documents the reasons for that risk, and provides a shared language that conservation organisations, governments, and funders can use to prioritise action. The Heritage Crafts Red List applies the same logic to craft knowledge: the craft is the species, the practitioners are the population, and the conditions threatening it  -  economic pressure, ageing demographics, lack of succession  -  are the habitat pressures driving decline.

The comparison is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a genuine structural similarity. Just as a species can survive in small, isolated populations that are more vulnerable to a single bad year than a large healthy one, a craft can survive with a handful of practitioners who are more vulnerable to individual deaths or retirements than a widespread one. Just as a species that has lost its breeding-age females is in more immediate danger than one that has lost only its young, a craft where the active practitioners are all over sixty and there are no trainees is in more immediate danger than one where the practitioners are spread across age groups.

How the research works

The research for each edition involves contacting, directly, over 900 organisations and individuals: craft guilds, training institutions, individual practitioners, heritage organisations, trade associations, and anyone else who can provide current data on the number of active craftspeople, the number of trainees, the average age of practitioners, the availability of training routes, and the economic pressures affecting the craft’s viability. Each craft is then assessed against a combination of objective criteria  -  head counts, essentially  -  and subjective criteria: what does the evidence suggest about the direction of travel? Is this craft gaining new entrants or losing them? Are the training pathways that exist functional or theoretical? Are the markets that sustain the craftspeople stable, growing, or contracting?

The result is a classification against five possible statuses, which the 2025 edition has refined further as part of the new Heritage Craft Inventory framework.

Cross-cutting designations

The 2025 edition also introduces two new cross-cutting designations within the Heritage Craft Inventory framework.

The Red List was first published on 3 May 2017, with financial support from the Radcliffe Trust and a foreword from the then Prince of Wales, who wrote:

That first edition assessed 169 crafts and identified 17 in the critically endangered category. The trajectory since then tells its own story.

The numbers tell a consistent story: the list is growing, the critically endangered category is growing faster than the endangered one, and the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating. From 17 critically endangered in 2017 to 72 in 2025. That is a fourfold increase in eight years, and nothing in the underlying conditions  -  workshop costs, raw material prices, demographic pressures on aging practitioner populations, the difficulty of pricing handmade goods in a market dominated by industrial alternatives  -  suggests the trend is about to reverse.

One of the most significant developments in the Red List’s history arrived not in the list itself but in a government announcement between the 2023 and 2025 editions. Following years of campaigning by Heritage Crafts and partner organisations, the UK Government ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage  -  one of the last countries in the world to do so.

The Convention is the international framework that recognises knowledge, skills, and practices  -  intangible heritage  -  as being of comparable cultural and social value to tangible heritage like buildings and monuments. Its ratification means, for the first time, that the UK is formally committed to identifying, documenting, and safeguarding its intangible cultural heritage. The Government’s consultation on how the Convention should be implemented cited the Red List as an example of good practice, and Heritage Crafts is currently working with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on implementation of a new UK inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

This is a substantial shift. For most of the Red List’s history, craft knowledge in the UK occupied an awkward position: widely agreed to be valuable, but not formally recognised by the state as heritage comparable to listed buildings or museum collections. The UNESCO ratification changes that framing. It means there is now a legal and policy context in which the loss of a craft skill is not just a cultural regret but a heritage failure  -  the kind of thing governments are supposed to prevent, not simply mourn.

Whether the practical consequences of ratification match the symbolic significance will depend on how the new UK inventory is developed and what resources follow it. But the direction of travel, and the fact that the Red List is specifically cited as the model for how the inventory should work, represents the most important policy development in heritage craft advocacy since the list was first published.

How the research is conducted

The Red List is not produced by a small team of experts deciding from the outside which crafts look precarious. It is produced by direct consultation with the craft community itself, which is both its strength and its limitation.

For the 2025 edition, research ran from September 2024 to May 2025 and involved direct contact with over 900 organisations and individuals by email and telephone. The scope covers every craft guild and professional association in the UK, training institutions from universities to specialist schools, individual practitioners identified from previous editions and through extended networks, heritage organisations with relevant expertise, and anyone else who can provide current data on a specific craft’s situation. The research is led by Mary Lewis, Heritage Crafts’ Head of Craft Sustainability, and the 2025 edition was funded by the Pilgrim Trust, with additional project funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Swire Charitable Trust, and others.

Each craft is then assessed against both objective and subjective criteria. The objective criteria are quantitative: how many practitioners, how many trainees, what is the trend direction. The subjective criteria are qualitative: given everything known about this craft’s situation, how likely is it that the skills can be transmitted to the next generation? The combination is deliberate. Pure head counts can miss structural problems  -  a craft with twenty practitioners, all of whom are over seventy and none of whom have apprentices, is more immediately at risk than a craft with ten practitioners, half of whom are actively teaching. The qualitative assessment catches what the numbers alone do not.

The Red List was always intended to be more than a document. It was intended to be a call to action, specifically to funders and policymakers, to direct resources toward the crafts most at risk before they pass the point of no return. The Heritage Crafts Association’s own response to that call was the Endangered Crafts Fund, established in 2019, which provides small grants to craft practitioners and organisations working to support crafts classified as endangered or critically endangered on the current Red List.

The grants are targeted at the specific bottleneck that the Red List research consistently identifies as the most critical: the transmission gap. The moment when a craftsperson needs to step back from production to teach someone else, earning almost nothing during that period, which most craftspeople cannot afford to do without external support.

The funded projects are specific and practical, and reading them gives a clearer picture of what craft survival actually looks like at ground level than any amount of general advocacy.

Each of these grants represents a specific person acquiring or transmitting a specific skill at a specific moment when that transmission was otherwise unlikely to happen. Whether the funded apprentice stays in the craft, whether the funded master finds a successor who carries what they learn forward  -  these questions are not resolved by a small grant. But the grant creates the possibility where there was none, and in the ecosystem logic of craft survival, that is what matters.

Applications are invited on a rolling basis. Details and application guidance are available at heritagecrafts.org.uk/ecf.

The Heritage Crafts Association does not work in isolation, and the Red List functions as a shared evidence base for a number of organisations working in adjacent areas. Understanding the wider landscape helps explain both the progress that has been made and the scale of what remains to be done.

The Red List is a free, publicly available document. The 2025 edition can be downloaded directly from the Heritage Crafts Association website at heritagecrafts.org.uk/skills/redlist. It is also browsable online by category, making it possible to search by region, by risk level, and by craft type.

The Red List is not only a record of decline. It also documents, in the resurgent category and in the movement of crafts between categories across editions, what genuine recovery looks like. Understanding the conditions that produce recovery is as important as understanding the conditions that produce decline.

Dry stone walling is the most cited example of a craft that has shown real resurgent characteristics in recent editions. The Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain has built a structured certification scheme  -  a sequence of accessible courses with graded assessments, leading to certification at multiple levels  -  that creates a legitimate training pathway where none previously existed in any organised form. That pathway is reinforced by a demand side: the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, Natural England, the National Trust, and landscape conservation bodies all employ certified wallers for maintenance work on the historic field systems of upland England. Trained wallers can find work. That basic economic reality changes the calculation for someone considering whether to invest time and effort in learning.

Several organisations are attempting to build similar structures for other endangered crafts. The British Artist Blacksmiths Association and the National School of Blacksmithing at Hereford College of Arts together provide a training and community infrastructure for smithing. The Basketmakers’ Association supports weavers across traditional and contemporary forms. The Association of Professional Thatchers maintains a professional register and advocates for the craft’s role in maintaining listed buildings. Each of these, in different ways, is trying to solve the same problem: make it possible to learn, and make it worth having learned.

The Makers strand of The England Archive uses the Red List as its primary prioritisation tool. Every craftsperson we approach is assessed against the list, and our documentation efforts are weighted toward those in the critically endangered category  -  the crafts where the window for witnessing living practice is shortest.

We are also paying close attention to several crafts whose ecosystem dependencies make their loss doubly significant. The stained glass repair crisis, which followed directly from the extinction of mouth-blown flat glass making in 2022, is a clear example of how one craft’s loss immediately threatens another. We are documenting stained glass conservation practitioners while they exist, understanding that the skills they hold become harder to exercise with each year that passes without the source material.