The Repair Shop: Tales from the Workshop

Against the background of yet more evidence of the low standing of vocational education and training in the English education system (Owen 2018), it is refreshing, if a little surprising, to learn that the BBC series, The Repair Shop, is amongst the currently most popular programmes on terrestrial television (BBC 2021). Both the recently published books are intended to accompany and add background detail to the series, and both fit well with the cultural resurgence of interest in craft and manual work over the last decade or so.

Matthew Crawford in his Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) sought to emphasise the ‘cognitive demands of manual work’ and, within the context of craftwork, explained that ‘skilled manual labour entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science’ (21). In a similar vein, Trevor Marchand is involved in an ongoing project which challenges an education system in which ‘working with the hands is perceived as a fallback position – a second choice’. He defines his mission in terms of ‘challenging the mind-body dichotomy’ and explains that his research aims to ‘explore and expose the complexity of knowledge that is actually involved in handwork, and thereby raise its status in the eyes of educationalists, the government, and the general public’ (in Edmonds and Warburton 2016, 124).

Marchand clearly faces an uphill struggle with this project, but the popularity of the values espoused in The Repair Shop can offer valuable support in this respect. Billed as an antidote to our throwaway culture, the series of programmes does far more than this and sends a message which is directly relevant to the problem of the subordinate status of vocational pursuits. The overarching message is that craft and manual work is valuable, rewarding, aesthetically pleasing and conducive to community harmony and collaborative enterprise. As Jay Blades notes in the Foreword to the 2020 book, ‘watching talented hands do exquisite work never grows old’ but – in addition to the diversity of skills on display by the craftspeople in the workshop – it is the moral purpose of the restoration work and the social relationships of the workers and their connections with the public that combine to celebrate the value and appeal of craft and handwork.

Items are brought into the shop – often ones with special sentimental value such as radios or pieces of furniture associated with deceased friends and relatives – and the repair shop workers immediately pool ideas about how to refurbish and restore to life the articles presented. Typically, a leatherworking expert would consult with woodworkers about an item of furniture and the process of refurbishment would be illustrated throughout various stages up to its completion, often in a nearly-new state. Such collaboration is intrinsically fascinating and engrossing but, more significantly, it illustrates the supreme importance of team work in all aspects of craftworking, a process fully in line with what Marchand (2016) describes as the ethics and ‘social politics’ (5–7) of craft (also emphasised by Sennett 2009). The importance of the physical and embodied nature of all learning is also highlighted here, a notion which finds resonance in the recently re-introduced gold standard ‘meister’ qualification in German occupational education (Oltermann 2019). It can be interpreted as a recognition that, as Oppenheimer (2019) observed in a recent paper, the ‘future is handmade’ as he describes the work of ‘artisans and thought leaders who are redefining craft, skill and, ultimately, the real meaning of a knowledge economy’ (1).

As Nicholson’s (2020) review of the BBC series observes, there is a magic to the relationships between the public and craftspeople which consists in the bringing to life of articles which have overwhelming sentimental and emotional memories attached to them. In the recent BBC book (2020), for example, there are stories about a cherished family pump organ – transported all the way from Jamaica to Birmingham in 1953 – restored by David Burville who devoted six days of intensive work, extensive research and passionate craft ingenuity to the task. When the two remaining sisters of the original Kingston family were presented with the rejuvenated organ originally played by their mother they were overcome with emotion, declaring that it feels like their deceased mother ‘is being heard again in our family’.

The book is filled with similar stories – such as the silver-plated Russian samovar brought to England by an Iraqi family in 1980 – restored to its former tea-making prime and enabling the family to recall cherished memories of life back in northern Iraq. The historical detail of these family stories bring life to the cherished objects and provide a fitting backdrop to the careful craftwork on display. In the 2019 account of the workshop, Jay Blades refers to the ‘single-minded attentiveness and nimble fingers’ of the craftspeople, who are concerned with ‘an emotional return rather than a financial one’ in putting a piece of family history back into place.

However, in spite of the revival of interest in craft and manual work exemplified in the The Repair Shop, the damaging divisions between theory and practice and body and mind condemned by Crawford and Marchand are unfortunately still with us, along with the subordinate status of vocational studies. Dewey ([1916] 1966) was also a fierce critic of such divisions and his life work represented an attempt to break down the ‘antithesis of vocational and cultural education’ based in the false oppositions of ‘labour and leisure, theory and practice, body and mind’ (306). There is not the slightest sign of these pointless divisions in the workshop; not a hint of the absurd separation of hand and brain in the passionate commitment to careful craft skills in the repair of valued articles for the public. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to imagine that Dewey would be delighted by the recent resurgence of craft work and, if he was alive today, he would be a regular visitor to – and no doubt a worthy patron of – The Repair Shop.