Portland works in Guardian G2 feature

 On the corner of Hill Street and Randall Street in Sheffield, not far from the Bramall Lane ground of Sheffield United (known, for a reason, as the Blades) is a large brick building called the Portland Works. Built in the 1870s, it is one of very few workshops still used by the city's surviving Little Mesters – the highly skilled, self-employed craftsmen who formed the backbone of what was, back then, the cutlery and tool-making capital of the world.
Sometime in late 1913, a metallurgist called Harry Brearley showed up at this building, hoping to interest a cutler who worked there, RF Mosley, in a shiny, chromium-heavy steel alloy he had discovered that seemed almost completely resistant to corrosion. Mosley was indeed interested, and soon enough the first stainless steel cutlery ever made left the Portland Works.
Next month, Sheffield city council's planning committee will consider an application to turn Portland Works into 66 studio apartments and some office space. The structure itself is Grade II* listed, and the development looks sympathetic enough. But if it goes ahead, the small group of present-day Little Mesters who occupy the Portland's warren of workshops – a knifemaker, a tool forger, a silver plater, an engraver, a die maker – will be gone, probably for good.
"I'd estimate that more people in the world today eat with stainless steel knives and forks than speak English," says Robin Wood, chair of a newly formed lobby group, the Heritage Crafts Association, which is being launched today at the Victoria & Albert museum. "You could argue it's our biggest cultural export. So it seems quite extraordinary that we can protect the bricks and mortar of a place like this, but not care in the least about the skills and craftsmanship that are so much of this city's culture and identity."
Modern Britain, it seems, is not much fussed about the skills and knowledge that exist only in the minds, eyes and hands of people who make things – our living vernacular heritage. We like them, in a rose-tinted, nostalgic kind of way, but we don't do much to support them.

Read the rest here 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/22/heritage-crafts-at-risk