I have been reading James Fox’s new book Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades, a wide-ranging and well-written exploration of mostly, but not exclusively rural industries which employ craft skills: dry stone walling: thatching; coppicers; Felicity Irons, a rush weaver; the wheelwrights and tanners of Colyton.  Not surprisingly, I was particularly interested in his good account of Taylors, the last remaining bell foundry in England, based in Loughborough; and by the speed and scale of the loss of metal-working trades in Sheffield, which seem to have been allowed to disappear without much effort to protect them.  I’m not convinced that Lida Cardozo Kindersley belongs in this company, being much better known and practising a skill which is not about to vanish.  But cumulatively the book demonstrates the importance of craft skills and both their economic and social value.  But many of them have already pretty well gone.