Leather is a material that helps societies flourish

Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

“The world is waking up to craft” was the major theme in Bill Amberg’s address to students at the Leatherwork Showcase and Prizegiving event at Capel Manor. “This is a great time for makers”, according to one of the top UK’s top leather designers.

“Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.”

Current aging demographics, climate change and constant economic turmoil are pulling GDP down and should drive societies towards choosing stewardship of resources rather than extraction and consumption, which in turn should pull us towards well-crafted, durable products. So, Amberg’s opinions on underlying trends make sense.

I am reminded of the 1960s film “The Graduate”, in which career advice was loudly and pointedly given to the befuddled and aimless college graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) by a family friend that he should look at “Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.”

I was studying Leather Science at Leeds University then and the great tannery exodus from Europe had not begun. But cheap plastics, globalisation and overexcitement about new technologies increasingly put leather under pressure throughout the world and ever since.

The question now being addressed by Bill Amberg and Capel Manor is how we educate society to understand the value of materials, craftsmanship, longevity and the communities that sustain them in an age increasingly dominated by disposability and dematerialisation. What is the role of materials like leather in the age of AI?

Capel Manor provides a strong answer to that question. Instead of retreating during the last year, it has been plotting a major expansion in its leather activities. It sees this as a natural development of its “land-based” community.

Vocational training

Capel Manor is a London-based college providing “land-based and animal related” vocational training to 3000 students annually across five campuses in London. Its home campus on the ancient Capel Manor Estate is where its current Saddlery and Leather training facilities are to be found, housed in part of a Victorian stable. The plan will refurbish the entire stable block, creating a reception and display area and improved workshops. Most significant is that four rent free workshops will be created for selected graduates for up to three years to support them in establishing their businesses. A funded internship programme will help them with materials and subsistence, but they will be expected to contribute a little time to teaching and helping with the centre.

Much of the support for this activity will not come from government but from private industry, foundations and philanthropic minded bodies and families. In Europe generally, governments now speak highly of apprenticeship-type entry routes into employment, but how they fund it is patchy.

Britain, particularly, seems incapable of solving the issue, having withdrawn most funding from colleges such as Capel Manor in the 1990s to push a huge expansion in university education. Recent changes to move back towards apprenticeships have favoured older students and large companies with staff teams able to manage the bureaucracy, but almost impossible for small leather related SMEs. Writing in the weekend newspapers, Professor Alison Wolf notes pointedly that for “traditional crafts such as thatching or stonemasonry, training provision is simply drying up” — and hairdressing apprenticeships are “nosediving to oblivion”. Saddlery and leatherwork, dependent on tiny specialist providers and small craft employers, are structurally in the same endangered category. Capel Manor’s expansion ambitions are therefore swimming against a powerful structural current.

Yet, anyone seeing the quality of the work produced again this year by the students will recognise the belief and enthusiasm that is put into this work. We again talked with a cohort of passionate and determined students who have had to battle for funding to make it through the course and know that building a well-paid career will also be a battle, but who love the work. Yet, this community of leather workers is expanding. So, at a time when throughout the world we are seeing geopolitical and economic changes, often along with a broken or ignored apprenticeship system, leaving behind a generation of young people, the contrast between national policy failure and institutional ambition at the grass roots in the leather industry could not be greater.

Capel Manor is literally a supply chain in one institution. It has a certified organic farm (Forty Hall Farm with livestock), animal management students and a leather using school, all on connected sites. The hide-to-finished-goods logic is geographically and institutionally present in a way that very few pure craft colleges can claim. This “land-based” situation demonstrates and connects to the traceability and provenance conversations the leather industry cares about deeply.

Institutional support is needed

Capel Manor is managing to defy gravity because organisers such as the five Leather Livery Companies (Saddlers, Cordwainers, Curriers, Loriners, Coachmakers) provide the institutional depth, bursaries, awards, networks and prestige that the state has withdrawn. The guild system, in other words, is doing what the 2017 Apprenticeship Levy was supposed to do but did not. The Princess Royal is a member of the Saddlers, an expert horsewoman and a strong supporter of Capel Manor since 1986.

Involvement of organisations such as Livery Companies and some industry members is excellent as it provides mentors and knowledge as well as funding. But if tanning and leather-using industries do not start to prosper, that tacit knowledge and support will be lost even to the Livery Companies, who anyway do not have the infinite funds that some seem to believe.

What we have seen is that 40 years of meritocracy-as-credentialism hollowed out craft pathways, of which leatherwork is an emblematic case. Capel Manor’s existence as the only full-time saddlery school in Europe is a measure of how much has been lost. What the Principal trailed at the Showcase represents is an opportunity to grow not just saddlery but a fuller leather goods spectrum. The new Enfield campus redevelopment that will be completed in 2027 with new workshops and a retail outlet provides the physical infrastructure. The natural link to livestock gives it a pedagogical and provenance narrative.

The leather industry, leather buyers, tanners and leather goods manufacturers have a direct interest in the pipeline of skilled craftspeople. Luxury groups in particular have been investing in craft school partnerships on in Europe (the LVMH ‘Institut des Métiers d’Excellence’, for instance). The structural headwinds obvious in the UK have created the sad invention of the term NEETs – Not in Education, Employment, or Training – representing about 13.5% of the 16–24-year-old demographic or over a million young people. This has continued with levy distortion, frozen training budgets and small employer burdens which the Livery Company model partially circumvents for the moment. We must search wider for best practice and something more permanent to reverse this sad trend of lost youth.

Leather brands, tanners and buyers need to invest in this pipeline as a matter of commercial self-interest, not charity, and should not forget just how many hides and skins are now being thrown away and do not get into the leather supply chain.

I feel as though I am a novice in this space and along with visiting Capel Manor, have had two weeks of study from a leather point of view. A three-day micro tannery conference plus an interview with one of only twelve British horse loggers (with climate change and biodiversity loss an unexpected growth sector).

One thing is missing in the Capel Manor scenario which long term it would it be good to consider, and that is a micro-tannery in the complex. What is clear is that materials matter and whereas those plastics recommended as a career path to Dustin Hoffman 60 years ago have made companies and people rich and benefitted society in some important areas, they are now being found out for the harm and issues their cheapness and ubiquity has created.

So, when we ask, as we must do, what kinds of materials help societies flourish, the one material that comes to the fore is the oldest human produced material, provided by nature: leather. Let us all make sure that Capel Manor succeeds in its ambition and in twelve months we will be writing about a successful move completed. Moreover, let us see it not as a one off but a template for many similar moves in the UK and around the world. Let us be creative and ambitious looking forward in the leather industry. Not more of the same but celebrating our raw material with new communities of leathers, with different formats suited to each locality and an ability to integrate new smaller tanneries that do not cause disturbance with waste or excess water usage.

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.

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