How it started
The long way round
There is a version of this trade where a drawing goes to a casting house in Birmingham, comes back as a rough shape, and gets polished by somebody who has never met you. It is faster, it is cheaper, and it is most of what is sold as handmade.
I do it the other way, which is to say the old way. Metal arrives as sheet and wire. It gets cut, annealed, hammered, bent, soldered and hammered again until it is the thing on the drawing. A ring takes nine hours. A chain takes three days and most of my patience.
I trained in Glasgow and then went north, to a bench in Orkney where a silversmith called Ivar let me make mistakes on his metal for four years. He was not a warm man but he was an honest one, and he taught me that the only shortcut worth taking is doing the boring part properly the first time.
In 2013 I found this room. It is on the ground floor of a courtyard off Candlemaker Row, it has one high window facing north, and it flooded twice in the first winter. The bench came from a retiring silversmith in Leith and still has his initials cut into the underside, which I have never sanded off.
I make about two hundred pieces a year and take twenty-two commissions. Both numbers are caps rather than targets. Past them the work gets worse, and the whole argument for buying from one person rather than a factory falls apart.
The only shortcut worth taking is doing the boring part properly the first time.
The room
Six things you would see if you came
Nothing here is styled. It is a working room and it looks like one on a Tuesday afternoon.
The year
What a small workshop adds up to
Fig. 1
213pieces
Left the bench last year
Every one of them hallmarked
Fig. 2
22commissions
Taken, out of ninety asked
The cap has not moved since 2018
Fig. 3
94per cent
Of metal used was recycled
The rest was a platinum order
Fig. 4
13counters
Stock the work, in six countries
One shop to a city
Counted from the workshop book, January to December 2025.
You can tell a raised piece from a cast one in a second, and the difference is not the finish. It is that somebody decided where every millimeter of it went.
If you want to see the room, come and see the room.
Bench visits are Tuesday to Friday and take about half an hour. There is nothing to buy in the workshop and I will not try to sell you anything while you are standing in it.
Book a bench visit18 of 22
Commissions taken this year
Four places left before spring, then the book closes until September.