An enchanting and illuminating exploration of the history of craftsmanship and the world’s oldest craft traditions, documenting the rapid disappearances of time-honored practices and shedding light on artisanal work in the face of massive technological industrialization by renowned Cambridge art historian Dr. James Fox.

During an age of mass manufacturing, fast fashion, synthetic materials, and the unsustainable practice of companies valuing quantity over quality, a return to tradition, connection, and simplicity is essential.

Art historian and award-winning broadcaster Dr. James Fox explores rapidly fading crafts and artisanal traditions—such as coopering, basket weaving, wheelwrighting, metalwork, and blacksmithing—that have shaped so much of our history through their alchemy of handmade, human touch and generational wisdom.

Fox explains the history of craftsmanship in Britain, taking readers across the lands and communities that originated there and teaching them about the practices, traditions, and people at their heart. From coopers to thatchers, basket makers to bell founders and dry stone wallers, Fox tours Britain—once the workshop of the world—in search of its lost and disappearing craft traditions and the artisans trying to keep them alive, including a rush weaver who has managed to rebuild a sustainable business with her baskets and other wares; a bell foundry that uses the same practices it used in the nineteenth century; and dry stone wallers, who build walls that could last two centuries, one piece of stone at a time.

Part travelogue and part historical record, Craftland is a profoundly intimate meditation on our human cultural heritage, exploring what we lose as these traditions fade from view in the race for progress and what we stand to gain if we bring them back.