The People Who Keep England
Part One: The Weight of the Keys
There is a word that sits at the heart of this category, and it is worth starting there.
Warden. From the Old French wardein, which came from the Frankish wardōn, which meant to guard, to watch over, to hold in trust for another. A warden is not an owner. The distinction is precise and it matters enormously. An owner possesses something and may do with it as they please. A warden holds it. The building, the tradition, the accumulated significance of a place - these are not theirs to keep for themselves. They are theirs to pass on.
England has tens of thousands of wardens. Most of them do not use the word. They call themselves churchwardens, or landlords, or hall secretaries, or volunteers, or just the person who holds the key. But the function is the same across all of them: someone who was not there when the thing was built, who will not be there when it finally falls or is demolished or simply ceases to be used, but who has accepted, for whatever span of years their circumstances allow, the job of keeping it standing and open and alive in the meantime.
This is what the Keepers strand of The England Archive is about. Not the buildings themselves, though the buildings are extraordinary. Not the institutions, though some of the institutions are ancient. The people. The specific, irreplaceable individuals who looked at a 900-year-old church with a leaking roof and a heating bill they could not cover and a congregation that has been shrinking for forty years, and chose to stay. The landlord of a pub whose interior has not been altered since 1890 and who has turned down every offer to renovate it because the original snug and the original bar and the original tilework are worth more than the money. The woman who has been opening the village hall every Tuesday morning for twenty-three years to run the community library, and who nobody has thought to replace because everyone assumes she will simply continue.
The Church Problem
England has approximately 16,000 Church of England parish churches. Around 12,000 of those buildings are listed, meaning the state has formally recognised them as being of special architectural or historic interest. Many of them are the oldest standing structures in their communities. Some are the oldest standing structures within ten miles in any direction. They contain, collectively, more medieval art than the whole of the rest of Europe: stained glass, wall paintings, carved screens, memorial brasses, misericords, fonts, effigies. They are the single most concentrated repository of English material history in existence.
They are also in serious trouble.
The National Churches Trust, which funds repair work and surveys the condition of church buildings across England, Wales, and Scotland, estimates that approximately 3,500 Anglican churches in England are at risk of significant deterioration within ten years without major intervention. The repair bill runs into billions. The average annual maintenance cost of a rural parish church is between £10,000 and £25,000, depending on the building’s age, size, and condition. The average rural congregation contributes far less than that. The gap is covered by grants, by fundraising, by the personal sacrifice of churchwardens who run jumble sales and coffee mornings and sponsored walks, and by the steady erosion of reserves that many churches have been drawing down for decades.
The Church of England has been losing around 20 church buildings per year to closure, conversion, or demolition for most of the past thirty years. That figure has remained stubbornly consistent. Some of those closures are managed and appropriate: a church in a growing town centre where the congregation has moved to a larger building, a Victorian addition in a suburb where the parish has merged. But many of them are not. Many are medieval buildings in rural villages where the closure means not the end of a congregation but the end of the village’s 900-year-old heartbeat.
When a church closes, what follows is not preservation. The Churches Conservation Trust, which takes on redundant churches declared surplus to the Church of England’s requirements, currently manages around 350 buildings, which is its maximum practical capacity. For every church the CCT can absorb, others are sold. Converted to houses, to holiday lets, to artist studios. The conversions are sometimes sympathetic, often not. And even the sympathetic ones end a specific function: they stop being places that hold the community’s grief, its marriages, its festivals, its continuity. They become private spaces. The public is no longer welcome. The building survives; the belonging it housed does not.
The churchwarden sits at the centre of all of this. It is one of the oldest lay offices in the Christian tradition, codified in English law under the Churchwardens Measure 2001 but in practice far older: the office appears in records from the 14th century and was common by the 15th. The warden’s legal duties include maintaining the fabric of the building, holding the church’s goods and property in trust, and overseeing the general running of the parish. In a functioning, well-resourced urban parish with a vicar, a paid administrator, and an active congregation, the churchwardenship is a manageable role. In a rural benefice where one vicar serves eight villages, each with its own ancient church, its own leaking tower, its own cracked window and collapsing path, the churchwarden is the entire operational team. The fabric inspector, the fundraiser, the keyholder, the person who turns up when the alarm goes off at 3am, the person who writes the grant applications, the person who finds the plumber who works on old buildings, the person who makes sure the building is open when the tourists come in July and heated when the congregation comes in December.
Most churchwardens are volunteers. Most of them are not young. Most of them have been doing the job for longer than they originally intended, because the person who was supposed to take over did not materialise. I have spoken to wardens who have been in post for fifteen years, for twenty years, for twenty-five. Not because it is easy or because it is glamorous, but because they looked at the building in their care and could not bring themselves to leave it without someone to take their place, and the someone never came.
What happens when they stop is not abstract. It is a specific building, in a specific village, that begins to deteriorate, that begins to close for longer periods, that begins to feel disused and disregarded, that begins to attract the reports that end in CCT acquisition or sale or, in the worst cases, structural emergency and demolition.
The Friends of Friendless Churches - the charity that holds church buildings that even the CCT cannot take on - currently has 64 buildings in its care. The name is not whimsy. These are buildings that have outlasted every institutional mechanism designed to hold them. They are still standing because individuals chose to hold them when all else failed. That is the Keeper spirit in its most concentrated form.
What a Churchwarden Actually Knows
Here is what rarely gets said about the people who hold these buildings: they are, many of them, extraordinary repositories of knowledge that does not exist anywhere else.
The churchwarden who has been in post for twenty years at a medieval parish church knows that building the way a doctor knows a patient. She knows which corner of the nave collects damp after a north wind, and why, and what it means. She knows the name of the stonemason who did the last major repair to the south transept and whether his work has held. She knows that the stained glass in the east window is not all from the same century, that the lower lights were replaced in the 1880s after a storm and the upper lights survived from the 14th century, and she knows this not from a guidebook but from the faculty records she found in the vestry cupboard when she took over. She knows the families whose gravestones line the south wall, knows their descendants who still live in the village, knows which ones would donate to a repair fund and which ones would like to be consulted but probably would not give money. She knows, without being able to explain how she knows it, that the tower is fine, that the crack in the north aisle is stable, that the thing to watch is the lead on the chancel roof because it has been moving slightly for three years and will need addressing before the winter after next.
None of this knowledge is written down. It lives in her.
The Historic England building records for any given listed church will tell you the architectural periods, the grade, the significant features. The Church of England’s inspection reports will log the structural condition. The faculty register will document changes. But the living knowledge - the knowledge of how this specific building behaves, what it needs, who cares about it, what its history feels like from the inside - that lives only with the people who have held the keys.
When a churchwarden of twenty years retires without a successor who takes the role seriously, that knowledge retires with her. The new warden will learn the building in time, if they stay. But the institutional memory of what that building has been through, what it has needed, what has worked and what has not, is gone. And in its absence, mistakes get made. Work gets commissioned from contractors who do not understand the materials. Repairs get carried out using methods that are wrong for the structure. Things that have been managed carefully for decades get missed.
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings runs training days for churchwardens specifically because this gap is so well documented and so consequential. Understanding the principles of breathable construction, of why cement pointing in a stone church is not just aesthetically wrong but structurally damaging, of how to read damp in an old building and what it is telling you - this is the knowledge that keeps a medieval building alive, and it has to be held by the people on the ground, not just by consultants who visit once every five years.
The Architectural Heritage Fund, which provides development funding and loans for heritage buildings at risk, has documented repeatedly that the single most important factor in whether a building at risk gets saved is whether there is a committed individual with local knowledge driving the effort. Not money, though money matters. Not planning permission, though that matters too. The person. The churchwarden who has been there twenty years and knows everyone and will not give up. Remove that person and the money and the permission and the goodwill are not enough on their own.
The Numbers Behind the Closures
The church closure figures are the most documented part of this story, but they are not the whole story.
England had around 60,000 pubs in the 1970s. By 2024, that number had fallen to somewhere below 45,000, and the rate of closure in the years since 2008 has been documented by the Campaign for Real Ale at various points reaching 50 pubs per week. That rate has slowed somewhat, but the long-term trajectory is unmistakable. Thousands of pub buildings have been converted to housing, to supermarkets, to restaurants that no longer function as locals. The physical fabric of many of them has been stripped back: the original bar counters removed, the snugs knocked through, the tilework covered, the inglenooks remodelled. In the language of pub conservation, they have been “de-pubbed,” and the process is irreversible.
The CAMRA Pub Heritage Group maintains the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, a list of pubs whose interiors retain sufficient original features to be considered of national importance. The current Inventory lists around 270 pubs in England. In a country that once had 60,000 of them, 270 with nationally significant interiors. That is not a rounding error. That is the result of fifty years of renovation, conversion, and the quiet corporate decision that a Victorian tiled floor was an obstacle to the branded rollout.
Each pub on that Inventory has a Keeper. The landlord of the Fleece Inn at Bretforton in Worcestershire, owned by the National Trust, manages a building that contains pewter mugs dated to the 17th century, still kept on the shelves where they have always been kept. The landlady of the Blue Anchor in Helston in Cornwall, one of the oldest continuously licensed premises in England, brews the pub’s own Spingo ales in a brewery that has been on the same site for at least 600 years. These are not museum-pieces-that-happen-to-serve-beer. They are working businesses whose viability as working businesses is the only thing keeping their interiors intact.
When a heritage pub’s landlord retires, the building does not automatically fall to a successor with the same values. It falls to whoever buys or leases it, and in the economics of the current pub trade, the person most likely to buy it is a developer or a chain operator for whom the original tilework is a renovation cost rather than a reason to take the building on. The Historic England listing of a pub interior provides some protection, but listing is not a guarantee. It is an obstacle that determined developers have found ways around, and it does nothing to protect the institutional knowledge - the landlord who knows every supplier, every local, every quirk of the building - that makes the pub what it is.
The village hall is less dramatic but perhaps the most universally significant. England has approximately 10,000 village halls, and the Action with Communities in Rural England network, which supports rural community buildings across the country, estimates that a significant proportion of them are run by volunteers who are struggling to recruit successors. The village hall is the last secular gathering place in thousands of communities. The church has its congregation, however diminished. The pub has its trade, however difficult. The village hall has the toddler group, the WI, the polling station, the post office one day a week, the community cinema, the art class, the lunch club for the elderly, the rehearsal space for the pantomime, the overflow venue for every local event that needs a roof. When the committee that runs it gets too old and too tired and no one steps forward, the hall does not immediately close. It deteriorates. The maintenance gets deferred. The bookings get harder to manage. The insurance lapses. The boiler fails and the repair is too expensive to justify for a building that is only half-used, and suddenly the community is left with a listed building it cannot afford to maintain and cannot bear to lose.
What Was Lost, What Remains, and Why the Witness Matters
The Diversity Already Gone
England once had hundreds of distinct regional varieties of basket. Not different styles, as in aesthetic preferences. Functionally different objects, made from different materials, using different techniques, in response to the specific needs of specific communities in specific landscapes, refined over generations until the form fitted the function as precisely as anything can fit anything.
Sussex trugs for kitchen gardens, shaped from cleft sweet chestnut and willow grown in managed coppice woodland nearby, with a handle that sits naturally in the arm for the particular gait of someone walking between beds. Gower cockle baskets, made in the single village of Penclawdd in South Wales using hazel from the woods immediately above the village, carried across the Loughor Estuary on the backs of women who had learned the walk from their mothers. Kishies in Shetland, woven from oat straw in a technique brought by Norse settlers more than a thousand years ago. Oyster tendles at Mersea Island in Essex, shallow and wide to carry catch up from the water without crushing it. Herring swills at Great Yarmouth, deep and narrow with particular handle placement, designed to be stacked in the hold of a working boat. Whiskets along the Welsh borders, used by itinerant potato harvesters. Covent Garden sieves, made within a few streets of central London for the wholesale vegetable market that no longer exists in that form.
Each one of these was a piece of local intelligence. A community’s answer to its own problem, worked out across decades, encoded in the hands of people who learned it from people who learned it from people. The herring swill did not come from nowhere. It came from fishermen on the Norfolk coast understanding exactly how much weight their baskets needed to carry, how they needed to shed water, and which local willow had the right combination of flexibility and strength for the purpose. That specificity is not nostalgia. It is design at its most rigorous, produced by a process of refinement that no design consultancy has ever matched, because no design consultancy has a century of daily use and repair feeding back into the brief.
The Basketmakers’ Association, which represents weavers working in traditional and contemporary forms across the UK, maintains records of these regional traditions and has supported documentation projects for some of them. But most of these baskets are gone now, along with the knowledge that produced them and the industries that made them necessary. They are not archived in any meaningful sense. Photographs exist of some of them. A few examples sit in museum collections, including at the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading, which holds one of the most comprehensive collections of rural craft objects in the country. But the knowledge, the making, the community of practice that produced and sustained these things, that is absent. What we have is the object without the understanding, the artefact without the intelligence it embodied.
And the basket is only one category, chosen because the regional diversity is so documented and so clearly lost. Walk through the same exercise for leather goods, for ironwork, for textile production, for woodworking traditions, and the same pattern repeats: a country that once produced hundreds of regionally distinct material solutions to shared human problems, each one a form of concentrated local knowledge, and that has in the space of two or three generations forgotten most of them so thoroughly that we no longer know what we no longer know.
Four Crafts in Detail
Thatch
England has more thatched buildings than any other country in northern Europe, somewhere in the region of 60,000 properties, concentrated in the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Suffolk, Norfolk, and the Thames Valley, but scattered in smaller numbers through almost every county. The tradition of thatching in England is probably four thousand years old. The techniques, the materials, the tools, and the knowledge of how a roof should breathe and shed water and last have been refined across all of that time.
A master thatcher working with long straw, the traditional material for the Midlands and East Anglia, is doing something that takes at least four years of daily practice to begin to understand and perhaps a decade to do well, and that is before accounting for the regional variation. Long straw technique is different from combed wheat reed technique, which is different again from the water reed work dominant in Norfolk and Somerset. A thatcher trained in one tradition may be competent in another, but the full depth of knowledge in each is its own body of learning, distinct and only partially transferable.
The Association of Professional Thatchers represents working thatchers across England and maintains registers of practitioners by region, but the numbers in some counties are alarming. There are rural areas where the last thatcher with deep knowledge of the local long straw tradition is over sixty, and the pipeline of people coming through to learn from them is thin or nonexistent. When a listed thatched building in those areas needs re-roofing, the work gets done, but it gets done by someone trained in a different regional tradition, and the local character that SPAB and Historic England’s conservation frameworks were designed to protect is lost one roof at a time without anyone declaring it lost.
Blacksmithing
The British Artist Blacksmiths Association estimates there are around 1,500 working smiths in the UK, but that number covers a wide range of practice, from production smiths working with modern equipment making standard items to master craftspeople who can read a historic gate or railing and reproduce both the form and the method of construction correctly. The latter group is considerably smaller.
The National School of Blacksmithing in Hereford, which runs both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in blacksmithing and metalwork, is the primary formal institution for transmitting the full range of smithing knowledge in England. Its intake is modest, and not all graduates go on to work in heritage conservation contexts where the deepest traditional knowledge is needed. The school does exceptional work, but it cannot on its own address the scale of the succession problem across all of the craft’s regional variants.
What gets lost when specialist smithing knowledge disappears is not decorative. The ironwork in English churches, the gates and railings and hinges and locks in historic buildings, the agricultural equipment that still functions in working heritage landscapes, all of it requires craftspeople who understand how pre-industrial iron was worked, how the metal behaves differently from modern mild steel, how a repair should be made that respects the original technique rather than overwriting it. When that knowledge is gone, the objects it would have maintained begin to degrade in ways that cannot be reversed.
Dry Stone Walling
The dry stone walls of the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, and the Cotswolds are not decoration. They are functional infrastructure, enclosing roughly 5,000 miles of boundary in the Dales alone, maintaining field systems that shape the drainage, the ecology, and the grazing patterns of some of England’s most significant landscapes. They are also one of the few crafts on the Heritage Crafts Red List that has, in recent years, shown genuine signs of recovery.
The Dry Stone Walling Association has built a certification scheme and a network of instructors that has meaningfully increased the number of trained wallers in England over the past decade, and it represents the closest thing in the craft world to a functioning succession model. Its approach, building in accessible courses, graduated certification, a community of practitioners, and a connection to the landscape conservation sector that provides employment for certified wallers, has produced real results. Dry stone walling is still listed as vulnerable, but it is moving in the right direction rather than the wrong one, and it is a model worth studying carefully.
The key was that the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, which employs wallers for landscape maintenance across the Dales, worked with the DSWA and organisations including the National Trust to create a demand side that justified the supply side of training. Skilled wallers can find work. That simple fact changes the economic calculation enough to bring people into the craft and keep them in it.
Chair Bodging
In the beech woods of the Chiltern Hills, the chair bodger’s trade goes back at least to the 17th century and possibly much earlier. Bodgers worked in the woodland itself, using a pole lathe, powered by a springy branch above and a treadle below, to turn chair legs and stretchers from freshly split green beech, working through the winter and spring when the wood was right, selling their output to the furniture workshops in High Wycombe that assembled the famous Windsor chairs from their components.
The trade produced some of the most elegant objects England has ever made, in the least assuming possible way, by men working alone or in pairs in the woods, in structures they built themselves from poles and canvas, their output piling up around them in the cold. The Windsor chair is one of the finest pieces of vernacular furniture design in the world, and it is the direct product of this system, this division between the woodland craftsman who turned the components and the workshop craftsman who assembled them, each with their own deep specialisation.
There are perhaps a dozen people in England today who can work a pole lathe at the level of a traditional Chilterns bodger. The Windsor Chair Makers’ Project and the work of groups like the Furniture Makers’ Company have supported some documentation and transmission activity, and the bodging tradition is demonstrated regularly at craft events and living history sites, but demonstration is not practice and practice is not mastery. The knowledge that produced these objects at scale, working daily in the woods with the pole lathe as a professional tool rather than a heritage curiosity, lives in a very small number of people now, and most of them are not young.
The Organizations Holding the Line
It is important to say clearly that there are people fighting for this, and that some of their work is producing results. The Heritage Crafts Association, whose Red List is the central evidence base for everything described in this article, also runs the Endangered Crafts Fund and a Craftsperson in Residence programme that has placed traditional makers in schools, libraries, and community spaces. Their Find a Maker directory is one of the few places where you can locate active practitioners of endangered crafts and commission work from them directly.
Historic England’s Traditional Building and Crafts Skills programme funds research into the skills gap and has published surveys quantifying the shortage of craftspeople with knowledge of traditional construction techniques. Their work connects directly to the built environment consequences of craft loss, making the case in the language of infrastructure maintenance rather than cultural loss, which reaches audiences that cultural arguments do not.
The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading holds over a million items documenting English rural and agricultural life, including tool collections and craft objects whose context is increasingly dependent on oral testimony from the people who used and made them, and they have active programmes of collection and oral history work. Their partnership with the Oral History Society on testimonies from craft practitioners is producing records that will matter more with every year that passes.
The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, Contemporary Applied Arts in London, and regional craft networks including the Yorkshire Craft Guild provide platforms for working craftspeople that connect them to markets, commissions, and audiences. The Rural Crafts Association specifically focuses on the commercial viability of rural craft practice. These organisations are part of the support ecology that keeps practitioners in the work.
And Arts Council England, which funds craft practice through its National Portfolio and project grant streams, has, when adequately resourced, supported transmission projects, apprenticeship programmes, and documentation work. The resource constraints on public arts funding in recent years have made this support less reliable, but the programmes exist and they produce tangible results when they run.
None of this adds up to a sufficient response to the scale of what is happening. But it is real work, done by people who understand what is at stake, and it matters.
Why Makers Are the Most Urgent
Of the six groups that The England Archive is documenting, the Makers are the most time-critical. Not more important than the others. More time-critical.
A tradition can go dormant and be revived. The English Folk Dance and Song Society has documented cases of traditions that disappeared for thirty or forty years and were reconstructed from photographs, film, and the memories of participants who were children when they last saw them performed. A building can stand for centuries while the question of what to do with it gets debated. A landscape can recover if the conditions that damaged it are changed. But the knowledge in a craftsperson’s body has no patience. It will not wait. It cannot be reconstructed from photographs or film. It exists only as long as the person exists and is capable of work, and when that ends, it ends completely.
The Makers we are looking for are the people whose names would have become surnames in a different century. The thatcher working the last few miles of long straw ridge in a county where that tradition has almost entirely given way to water reed. The chair bodger still splitting ash in a Chiltern woodland, working a pole lathe that runs off a sapling above him. The lime plasterer who can read a historic building’s walls the way a diagnostician reads a patient, knowing from texture and colour and give exactly what mix a specific wall needs and why. The blacksmith who was taught to make arrowheads by someone who was taught in turn, and who is now one of the handful of people in England who can do it to museum specification. The coracle maker on the River Severn, working a form of watercraft that has been made in the same way on the same river for at least two thousand years.
These people are not museum pieces. They are not performers demonstrating old techniques for an audience. They are practitioners, working daily, maintaining the material fabric of England because without them it cannot be maintained. When a historic thatched roof needs re-laying with the correct regional material and method, they are the people who do it. When a medieval iron hinge needs replication for a listed building, they are the people who can match not just the form but the method. When a length of dry stone wall comes down in a Dales storm, they are the people who know how to read what was there and rebuild it correctly.
Their work is not heritage display. It is infrastructure maintenance.
What the Archive Is For
Documentary photography cannot save a craft. That would be dishonest to claim, and dishonesty is not what this project is for.
What it can do is change who knows, and sometimes who knows is the thing that changes what happens.
Most people in England do not know that a man in his seventies in Somerset may be one of three people in the country who can make a horse collar using traditional materials and methods. They do not know that the stained glass in their local medieval church cannot be replaced with matching glass if it breaks, because the knowledge required to make that glass no longer exists in England. They do not know that the basket their grandmother used, made from materials grown within five miles of her house in a form refined over a hundred and fifty years, is now an object that no one can make. They do not know any of this because the losses happen at the margin of public attention, quietly, without announcement, and because no one has shown them in a way that lands.
Data does not do this. A Red List of endangered crafts does not do this, because a list requires the reader to already care, and caring is what the list cannot itself produce. What produces caring is a face, and hands at work, and a workshop where the light falls through a single north window onto a bench worn smooth by fifty years of use, and a portrait of a person so absorbed in what they are doing that the watching becomes its own form of understanding.
These images carry weight that statistics cannot. They create the kind of knowing that makes people ask the right questions of the right people, and fund the right programmes, and choose, when they have a choice, to commission from a living practitioner rather than buy the mass-produced equivalent. They make visible the stakes of something that has been invisible.
The Heritage Crafts Association works with data. Historic England works with condition surveys and policy advocacy. SPAB works with technical guidance and professional standards. The Crafts Council works with market development and maker support. The Museum of English Rural Life works with collection and testimony.
The archive works with witness. It exists at a different register from all of these, not more important, but occupying the space that the other approaches cannot reach.
Some of the knowledge being documented in this project will not last another decade. Some of it will not survive another five years. The question is not whether it will end, because it will end. The question is whether anyone was paying attention while it was still there, and whether that attention produced something permanent enough to stand alongside it in the record of what England was and what England made.
That is what the archive is for.