Shoulder to the Wheel by Studio Hyde

SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL

SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL edited by G L E N N A DA M S O N and SIMON OLDING

ISBN: 978-0-9570212-9-7 Published by the Crafts Study Centre Crafts Study Centre University for the Creative Arts Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS www.csc.uca.ac.uk Book designer: David Hyde Proof reader: Alice McIlroy Published September 2019 on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Shoulder to the Wheel’ held at the Crafts Study Centre. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. The rights of Glenn Adamson, Paddy Bullard, Zoe Laughlin, Gareth Neal and Greg Rowland to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

The front and back covers and the line drawings on pages 11 and 23 are taken from the 1923 edition of George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.

Contents Introduction by Glenn Adamson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Shoulder to the Wheel: A Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Greg Rowland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Gareth Neal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Zoe Laughlin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Re-Reading The Wheelwright’s Shop by Paddy Bullard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Photographs from the archive of The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Further reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

The Wheelwright’s Shop, facing East Street, Farnham, about 1916, frontispiece to the 1923 edition of George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.

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Waggon Wheel, The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading This wheel came into the object collection of The Museum of English Rural Life in 1962, along with a west country ‘ship waggon’. Both were made in 1894, by the artisan C. Bailey of the village of Combe St Nicholas, Somerset, for Lords Leaze Farm, located in the nearby town of Chard. The wheels and undercarriage of the waggon were painted red, making a primary triad with the vehicle’s blue body and yellow end boards. When fully loaded, the waggon could carry 1,100 sheaves of wheat. 62/515 The waggon wheel is also illustrated on page 6. Photos by Laura Bennetto.

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

HERE IS NO POINT, the old adage goes, in reinventing the wheel. Whoever first said that must not have met a wheelwright. Though apparently simple in its design, consisting only of four components – hub, spokes, felloes and rim – the supposedly traditional waggon wheel is a thing of incredible beauty and sophistication, a technology that was constantly refined over many centuries. When George Sturt published his famous book The Wheelwright’s Shop, in 1923, this extraordinary body of knowledge was being shouldered aside. The advent of the motor car, and of rubber tyres, made the trade all but obsolete within a generation. The goal of the present exhibition, first presented at the Crafts Study Centre in Sturt’s own town of Farnham, is to revisit this domain of material intelligence and explore its wonders. To do this, we have taken an unorthodox approach. In collaboration with The Museum of English Rural Life (The MERL) at Reading University, which also serves as the second venue for the show, we have selected a single antique wheel dating to the era of Sturt’s involvement in the trade. We then invited three contemporary makers to create a work in its image:

Greg Rowland, Zoe Laughlin, and Gareth Neal. Each is a specialist in a particular aspect of craft and design; their competencies are quite different, though overlapping. Together, their responses to this historic artefact represent a multidimensional mediation on making, and the many ways that the past can inform and inspire present-day creativity. Rowland is the latest in a long lineage of Devon wheelwrights – long in this case meaning right back to the fourteenth century. He has made a close study of the wheel from The MERL collection, and then a close copy. Indeed, it is probably as close as anyone living could achieve, not just because of Rowland’s skills but also his workshop, which is fully equipped for the job. Our request did not present him with a wholly unprecedented situation. Like artisans of any era, much of his work consists in repair and replacement. His shop is often called upon to provide wheels to match an existing vehicle, and part of his expertise consists of connoisseurship, an intimate and detailed understanding of regional and chronological variants, so that he can provide an appropriate restoration. Like so many traditional makers, he says that he learns something brand new each day.

Rowland has also served as an informal chief adviser to the project. During our first team meeting at The MERL he walked us through the basics of wheel construction – such as its ‘dish’ or concavity, which increases its stability and weight-bearing capabilities – and noted specific features of this particular wheel’s style and condition, which marked it out as a rural product made entirely by hand (it was made not far from Rowland’s workshop, in Somerset, in the year 1894). What had been an inert museum object recovered something of its originally intended life as he canted it forward and rolled it side to side, mimicking the motion that it would have had when mounted on a vehicle. It was in this moment, thanks to Rowland’s lifetime of experience, in combination with the historic artefact and Sturt’s beautiful text, that we began to understand what we had got ourselves into. The designer Gareth Neal is a woodworker of quite a different kind. He knows his way around old furniture, to be sure, and often refers to it in his work. But he makes only forms of his own devising. One constant theme in his work has been the use of technique to imply a temporal shift. In his well-known George chest of 2008, for example, he sculpted the

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profile of a 1780s commode using a series of parallel cuts executed with a computer-driven router. The object appears to have been excavated from a block, as though it had been there all along. The partially distressed surface suggests the passage of time, an object either falling into ruin or emerging into reality. In his response to the exhibition, Neal went back to basics, imagining himself back to the very moment when humanity discovered the wheel. As he notes, this simple device could be considered ‘our greatest achievement’, as it has been instrumental to nearly every cultural advance we have made since – from grain mills to chariots, the printing press to the industrial revolution. In honour of this momentous breakthrough, and as a way of highlighting the technical sophistication of The MERL wheel, Neal began all over again. He simply fashioned a great round cross-section of timber, and then allowed it to have its way. Of course, wood is a living thing, contracting and expanding with humidity, so this monolithic disc immediately cracked. Curiously, once repaired with self-consciously ‘primitive’ techniques, this archaic ur-object looks suspiciously like modern art.

Zoe Laughlin works in a seemingly magical yet utterly pragmatic place called the Institute of Making. Think of it as a materials library, like one you might find in any art school, brought to a slightly illogical set of conclusions. It is a laboratory filled with tools and physical specimens of all kinds, with Laughlin and her colleagues presiding over a constant flow of students, staff, faculty, and other interested parties. The space positively fizzes with possibility, and that was palpable when our team gathered at the midpoint of the project for a conversation – transcribed in this volume. If Neal decided to look into the deep past of the wheel, Laughlin leans just slightly over the parapet of the future. At her request, The MERL wheel was brought to the Institute of Making and digitally scanned, transforming it into an abstract set of data points. Laughlin, who has just as much of a head for concrete processes as her two fellow makers, was intrigued with the ‘scaffolding’ that the scan contained, part of which captured the rough stand she had built to hold the wheel upright, and part of which was a purely digital effect. She decided to give this messy virtual object an actual, threedimensional form, without editing it in any way. Initially she hoped to

render it in a high-tech material – perhaps space grade aluminium – but this proved impractical, so she instead executed it in cheap and cheerful polyurethane foam. The resulting object is the antithesis of Neal’s wheel – insubstantial rather than massive – yet equally fragile and impractical. It has sprung from the computer’s brain like Athena from the head of Zeus, but seems to have only barely registered in the physical domain. Taken together, our quartet of wheels – the same number required for a functional waggon – pay elegant testimony to the poetics of making. They seem to converse with one another across time and space, converging on a prime object and staking out various positions in relation to it. The historic wheel is variously treated as a craft model, a design archetype, and a quarry of raw information. Even so, we have only barely scraped the surface of its potential. Sturt, I think, would want us to imagine the hands that made the wheel, and the life it had over the decades of its use. He would want us to imagine it revolving slowly down a road, in perfect synchrony with its three mates, with the waggon and its load, and with the landscape all around. And he would want us to ask what we

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have made, out there in the world, that could truly be said to better it. In 1956 a folklorist named George Ewart Evans published a book called Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. Written that much deeper into the twentieth century, it is even more heartbrokenly elegiacal in its portrayal of a disappearing agricultural life. Yet Evans also adopted Sturt’s anti-romantic stance. He approached the old ways of the countryside not in mourning, nor even in a preservationist mode, but rather in a spirit of active learning. ‘Since its fragmentation village life, and therefore the life of the nation, has suffered, because nothing comparable has taken its place’, Evans wrote. ‘And while it would be foolish to wish for its return, the gap it has left nevertheless emphasizes the need to build up a conscious community to replace it … We cannot build the future unless we know the past’. The need for ‘conscious community’ still exists today. As it happens, a waggon wheel is not a bad metaphor for a functioning society: a disposal of counterbalanced forces compounded of diverse materials, anchored by a shared centre yet radiating outwards in every direction, flexible but strong, capable of bearing great burdens when necessary. Also, a wheel, even when

well-made, creaks a bit in use. Any decent artisan, like any honest citizen, knows that the goal is never perfection. In craft and culture alike, we speak rightly of the importance of tolerance. Finally, we might reflect that when a wheel does get stuck in some rut or other, all is not lost. All that is needed is for people to get together and put their shoulder to it. Then the journey may continue. Glenn Adamson Dr Glenn Adamson is the curator and co-editor of ‘Shoulder to the Wheel’. He is a curator and writer at the intersection of craft, design history and contemporary art, and is Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

Right from top to bottom: Greg Rowland, Gareth Neal, Zoe Laughlin. Photos by Jon Stokes.

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S h o u l d e r t o t h e W h e e l : A C o n v e r s at i o n

N JANUARY 2019, at the midpoint of the Shoulder to the Wheel project, curator Glenn Adamson spoke with the exhibition’s three makers to discuss the progress of their thinking. The following transcription was recorded at the Institute of Making, University College London. Glenn Adamson: Let’s begin by learning about each of your backgrounds. Greg, maybe you can start. Greg Rowland: I am from a long line of wheelwrights. My family is traced back to 1331, and today is the largest wheelwright’s shop in the country, possibly the world. We have four wheelwrights working for us. We make wheels all day, about 200 a year. Wheels, waggons and carts. I was trained by my father, who was trained by his father. We skipped a couple of war generations, but the trade never seems to die out. The older guys sort out the younger guys. Zoe Laughlin: I am the co-founder and director of the space we are sitting in now, the Institute of Making. I am an art college graduate but also did a PhD in materials, and I try to look at things from a materials point of view. But I wear many hats: engineer, farmer, artist, designer, maker.

Gareth Neal: I come from a furniture background, mainly wood-orientated. My specialism in the furniture world is the relationship of traditional craft to digital manufacturing; so this project interested me because the wheel is inherently a piece of great design, which has come through a process of evolution. It became what a wheel had to be for the horse and cart, and that’s where it kind of stayed and stopped. Glenn: Greg, what did you think when we asked you to remake a wheel from the past? Greg: George Sturt is quite a famous name in my world, albeit a little world now, as there are not many of us. His book is synonymous with the history of the craft. The way he made wheels, and the way he described it, covers a period of change. But remaking one to follow in those footsteps is something you feel you have to do, and want to get right. Glenn: What about the idea of matching an existing wheel, rather than making one to your own design? Greg: We quite often have to match things, because people come in needing a replacement wheel we haven’t made before. I have never matched a Sturt one – in fact I am not sure I have ever seen a Sturt workshop wheel. There

are probably lots out there, it’s just that we don’t know they are Sturt wheels. Remanufacturing something in replication is pretty much our job. If we make a new vehicle, we’ll know we made those wheels. If we get someone else’s vehicle it has to look like they made those wheels. Glenn: A kind of craft ventriloquism. Greg: For sure. There’s a million different ways to make a wheel. Not all of them are wrong and not all of them are right either. But if it is the right process, the correct way of doing it, everything looks the same. Glenn: Zoe, what were your initial thoughts? Zoe: I was really excited because my practice has a lot of what I call ‘isomorphic objects’ – where the form is kept identical but the material changes. I have made sets of these objects. Often they represent the material in the game of the performance of the object, its functionality and meaning. For example I have made sets of tuning forks, of identical size but in 30 different materials. The different sound each fork makes is directly attributable to the performance of that material, what is going on at the molecular level –

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why copper is different from brass, is different from spruce. So my initial response to this project was, ‘ooh brilliant, a chance to make a thing out of a material at a bigger scale’. This is a big object, this wheel. But then I thought a lot about the actual wheel itself. It is a really perfected thing; everything has been honed incredibly well, it isn’t accidental. Wood is used in an amazing way, clearly because it is tried and tested, but the material is performing really well in this object. Having had a chance to live with the wheel, it has become a kind of friend, a workshop mascot. The reason it initially came to us was to create a 3D scan of it – so we could make a nonphysical thing of it. Yet I became very enamoured with its physicality. At the same time I’m drawn to look at what the cutting edge of making materials can offer that object now. Glenn: Gareth, first reactions to the project? Gareth: I was slightly terrified. It is exciting, because this wheel is a kind of exclamation mark at the end of a period of time. But as a wood person I find that quite scary. Because I am not a wheelwright. Just to make the wheel again, but a crap wheel, one that isn’t good enough to take the

weight of a cart, I wouldn’t want to do that. So how do I go from there? I am interested to go back to the process wheelmaking went through, over however many hundred years, to get to that point. Before they had the lathe, the spoke-shave, or the draw knife. So one thought I’ve had is to make a wheel just using an axe, and see what that looks like. Someone probably had a go at that at some point. It gets you all the way back to rolling an object over a tree trunk, perhaps with a lever, to get you from A to B. Whether it is right to press-gang such a project into a certain piece of wood is another question. Glenn: Let’s come back round to that. We have our historic wheel here. Greg, what do you notice about this particular example that strikes you as of interest? Greg: Firstly its age. In the time that it was made there were factories making wheels – there were thousands of them around. This one, however, looks rural, made in a country shop. It has something called a ‘full spoke’, which is where the timber is cleft to the spoke, tapered at the base that goes into the hub. That is why it has a big hub. And I notice that the spokes aren’t exactly spot on when you look across the wheel, they are just slightly off.

That makes it look as though it is handcrafted. Nothing wrong with a factory wheel, but the hand-crafted wheels do carry a little bit more soul with them. Glenn: What kind of date would you put on it? Greg: Anywhere between 1870 up to the end of the First World War. We lost a lot of the young guys who were called up to the army, because they needed wheelwrights at the front, for gun carriages and the like. So all the youngsters went to war and left the old guys making the wheels. This happened in my father’s case; a Victorian tradesman trained him. So the style of this wheel could have been taught even into the 1920s, though by then they had slightly harder edges on wheels, more just to do the job. They had begun to lose those generations of style that people had put into what they built. Glenn: That was the point when traditional wheelwrighting began to decline, as rubber tyres began to come in. Could you talk a little bit about that transition? Greg: It was apparently quite stark, not gradual. The First World War produced combustion engines and tractors in great volume. Coming out

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of that, there were many more lorries and trucks on the road. Farmers quite literally hitched up their carts behind their new powered tractors and pulled them to pieces, because they weren’t designed for it. No one wanted a cart. Farmers were piling them up and burning them. ‘Don’t want those bloody old things’. Glenn: And the workshops were converted into auto garages. Greg: It’s what you do – become an agricultural engineer or similar. If you can make a wheel, waggon or cart, you can pretty much turn your hand to most things. Glenn: Zoe, could you talk about what you have been doing with the wheel here at the Institute of Making? Zoe: When we first took it out of the van, it seemed quite heavy. Since then we have been rolling it around, and it feels incredibly light, until you have to put it somewhere that involves really lifting it and suddenly its materiality reasserts itself. I’ve found it opens up conversations – we have such a huge breadth of types of people who come into this space. It has been quite useful to have those conversations. But the first thing we did was to attempt a 3D scan of it.

We have two scanners, one that does very high resolution images of small things, and another that gives low resolution images of big things. This is a big thing, so we weren’t going to get a good resolution scan, but we thought we should give it a go. Then came the problem of how to get it to stand on its own – it had spent these last weeks leaning up against things. It was designed to always be attached to something. But to do the 3D scan we wanted it to stand independently and walk around it, 360 degrees. So the first thing was to make a stand to hold it up, with minimum intrusion into the scan. It was not at all a glamorous piece of making, just a matter of some offcuts. If I had made it thinking I was going to keep it, I would have done it much better. But the minute I used it I suddenly thought ‘Is that interesting? Maybe I should just keep that’. People started taking photos of it, because it suddenly had a different character, independent from the wall. Greg, do you in your shop ever have them on their own stood like that? Greg: We do, because when we are working on them we need the stability. So we have three or four stands in the shop.

Zoe: A stand for securely working on it would be very different. What I wanted was the absolute minimum you needed to stop it from rolling away. Although it is incredibly sophisticated technology, scanning is actually a poor way to make a copy of a thing. The best way is to take measurements and do a fresh drawing, not to 3D scan it. At the same time, as a way of making a copy it has its own interest. I wanted to keep that trail, of what that digital material was trying to be. So I have been making some 3D-printed maquettes, not of the wheel, but rather of the scans. There are many decisions to be made: what material, what size, how will you orient it? The 3D printer is not some automatic copying genius thing. A digital file can sit there in virtual space, perfectly, but you try to take it out into the real world and the soft material will collapse halfway through. This wheel needed a lot of support. So here’s the second scaffolding I am involved in. First, the physical stand, and now a digital frame to hold it. Spokes on the spokes to keep the spokes up, a perverse array. I am wondering whether there is something here that reveals what’s so good about the original. I have a similar problem to Gareth, I think: there is something optimum about this wheel, and I am

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not sure yet what I am going to say by making a copy. Gareth: I have this round piece of oak that came from East Sussex, from Ashdown Forest. It is roughly the same diameter as the wheel, but much, much thicker. I am tempted to use that, as it is an available material resource. I’m thinking about what you shouldn’t do with wood. The wheel shows you everything you should do, to get the strength, not end up with short grain problems, with splitting timber. How to make it as light and strong as possible. Perhaps I can communicate how good that wheel is by making a wheel that has all the mistakes. It would show why we don’t use big slabs of round timber to make wheels, because they just break and crumble and disintegrate. Zoe: So your bit is just a slice of a trunk… Gareth: It is basically the cut-off part of a trunk of a tree, all end grain. Zoe: And it is such a massive volume that that you could mill it out? Gareth: Yes, it would almost look like an aluminium casting, made in a mould. But as it dries out, it will split and break in half. The only way to stop

it doing that would be to put a big metal hoop round the outside. That is what I have got to, but whether it is a good idea or not I’m not sure. I also love the idea of just carving one with a flint. That would be quite fun as well. Glenn: Do you think if you mill the shape of a wheel out of the solid piece of timber, that you would in fact have a sculpture of a wheel? Gareth: Or just a nothing, because it is not the same as sculpture. The wheel is a very practical object, so it would be a negative comparison to that – more a tool to communicate, rather than a piece of sculpture. It would be a communication device. Zoe: I wouldn’t put a band on it, I’d let it break up. Let the material speak. Gareth: I see that. By the time it got to the show it would no longer be round, it would become a very wonky looking thing, rather lovely. Glenn: Would it actually split in two? Gareth: Maybe, that’s the risk. You could put some dovetail keys to stop it doing it, but then that starts to defeat the nature of the game. Glenn: Greg, do Zoe and Gareth’s responses remind you of the amount of

intelligence that is actually built into this wheel, help you see it with fresh eyes? Greg: Yes, quite possibly. You never take them for granted. Every day is a learning day with what we do; I often say I am 35 years through a 70-year apprenticeship. When we first started the project, I must admit I struggled a little because wheels are my life. When you hear someone trying to reinvent the wheel – the old adage – the technology Zoe is bringing into it, this is taking a really different view. My trade forever has to be made relevant, because who wants a cartwheel now? Zoe may be going a long way to bridging that gap. And I love Gareth’s idea about the representation of it. That is giving you 2020 – using a robot arm to carve it – but you are also going all the way back to the Stone Age. You’ve got a good symmetry between the two there. I am just the bit in the middle really, the evolution of it. I just know what it takes to make a cartwheel.

G R E G Row l a n d GARETH NEAL Z O E L AU G H L I N

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G r e g Row l a n d

WAS HONOURED TO BE ASKED to make a replica traditional cartwheel in the manner of the great Sturt. Wheels are what I do, and what I have done for over 30 years. So in some ways I have gained the easiest part of the project. I did not have to reinvent the wheel, merely replicate it. The original Somerset wheel was measured and checked so that dimensionally it would be correct and I set to marking out and cutting out the wheel parts. My aim was to use as many processes as I could that might have been used in Sturt’s shop, but also to use some modern methods which were not available then, fusing the two to end up with a traditional wheel. I was lucky that a contact near Farnham had some elm for the hub. This was turned to the style of the project wheel. Although the hub did have some splits – large hubs normally do – I used traditional methods of wedging the splits with elm wedges. Smaller splits had putty forced into them, which squeezed out when the wheel had its tyre put on. The iron hub rings were shrunk on, compressing the hub to try to avoid any further splitting, and the hub was morticed out. We used traditional whalebone to get the front angle of the spokes, which would form the wheel’s dish.

My father, Mike, produced the spokes. He is 82, and was trained by men who would have worked in the Sturt era, so his style for them seemed appropriate. They are made of oak. Traditionally they would have been cleft, but we gave way to modern methods and sawed the spokes from air-dried stock. The felloes ‘the curved pieces that make up the wheel rim’ are from ash, and this gave us the traditional wheel timbers of oak, ash and elm. With the hub banded and morticed we could set to driving the spokes into the hub. These have to be a tight fit, but not so tight that they split the hub. The spokes were levelled ensuring the correct dish was formed and then were tanged – the spoke ends were turned narrower to accommodate the felloes. The next process was to fit the felloes, pulling the spokes together with the ancient spoke dog and allowing the tangs to locate and drive the felloe on. The six felloes were all fitted, curfed at the joint to make them exact – making sure that the felloes still had some gaps so that the wheel could be compressed. The tyre (steel, not rubber) was rolled in our tyre roller. It is an 1860

O Left to right: George Richards, Journeyman; Mike Rowland, Master Wheelwright; Greg Rowland, Master Wheelwright. Photos by Jon Stokes.

Alldays and Onions roller and has certainly seen some work! The wheel was then measured with a traveller, basically a circle within a handle, and the measure was transferred to the tyre, with a special shrinkage allowance or ‘nip’ taken out. We then hot-bonded the wheel. The tyre was put in the fire until it was hot enough and then carried to the wheel, levered over and tapped down. Then water was poured against the tyre to cool it and shrink it, compressing the wheel and making it fit. A couple of hours finishing any edges and driving in the tyre nails and the wheel was ready to go to work. The wheel is not an exact replica, although it is close. But every tradesman has his own style and whilst it may not be obvious we can always recognize our own work. Greg Rowland is a master wheelwright, based at a workshop in Colyton, Devon. He joined the family business in 1993 having first completed an army apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer, followed by a period as a blacksmith. His father, Mike Rowland, taught him the trade. Wheelwrights have worked in the area since 1331. The Rowland company gained the Royal Warrant in 2005, and together

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Mike and Greg are the only father and son master wheelwrights in the world. Greg says that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I continually strive to evolve my most ancient of trades, carving a niche within the modern marketplace for traditional craftworkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. He makes and repairs wheels, carts and waggons, as well as gun carriages and military wheels. www.wheelwright.org.uk

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Gareth Neal

OW COULD YOU possibly improve the wooden wheel? It is the result of an accumulation of knowledge and experience over centuries, by wheelwrights who spent their whole lives mastering the craft. Like a pebble, worn smooth and clean by the pounding of the waves, the wheel is surely a design that has been perfected over the millennia, to be the strongest and lightest that it could be, through the cleverest use of timber. I wonder at the evolutionary process that led to this ultimate design, not so much creating as revealing the perfect solution to a fundamental problem of civilization. Do we really appreciate why these wheels are so good, and how they came to be? You might think that this was a problem for the archaeologist or historian, but these seekers can find little evidence that answers our questions. Wooden wheels rot away – all but one or two that were found in the bogs where they got stuck. So few are pictured on clay tablets or carvings – not enough to chart a complex evolution. This search must therefore be made by the engineer and woodworker, who did not observe our early wheelwrights from afar, but travelled the same path they did, solving the same problems, finding the same solutions, and perhaps

thinking the same thoughts. As you will know, wood expands and contracts now just as it did then. Some timbers are stronger than others, and all timber poorly used still shrinks, splits, warps, and rots. Let us start at the beginning, then. We can picture hundreds of men dragging huge stones across a plain. Maybe they are building the pyramids in ancient Egypt, maybe Stonehenge in ancient Britain. Wherever they are, they are wondering how they can make this transportation more efficient. We can ask exactly the same questions today. We can understand the problems they must have encountered – the weight of the load, the problems of soft and uneven ground. We can work out some of the answers, exactly as they did. They created roads, increased the size of the wheels, discovered the strength of the spindle. Each solution created new problems, and so began the cycle of invention, experimentation, and improvement. My wheel and its accompanying drawings are an encyclopedia of this evolution, from the problems of drying and splitting timber, through the first attempt at a spindle, to a celebration of the cross directional strength of the elm hub. Each thought is a step along the road that led to the wheel we now know.

But the path to the perfect wheel was not a smooth one and there were surely plenty of potholes along the way. Gareth Neal graduated in 1996 with a BA in Furniture Design and Craftsmanship from Buckinghamshire New University. He established a small workshop in Hackney Wick, London, in 2005. He moved to a new workshop in De Beauvoir Town, North London in December 2018. He says ‘we are hands-on designers and makers … fascinated by process, whether that be with traditional roots or the latest computer controlled router. This combined with a fascination of historical techniques and aesthetics roots our design within a specific context with rich narratives and contextual reference points’. His furniture has been acquired for major public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Crafts Council and the Shipley Art Gallery, and has been sold and exhibited internationally. www.garethneal.co.uk

Left: Gareth Neal; overleaf, Gareth Neal and Peter Kovacs. Photos by Jon Stokes.

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SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL

Z O E L AU G H L I N

HERE IS OFTEN a misconception that using digital tools allows the maker, intent on copying a form with exactitude, an easy route to highfidelity results. However, digital tools are simply tools. They are nuanced and temperamental. They require skills and experience to understand how they behave, what they can and cannot do, and what materials they can interact with. My first step in creating a copy of the cartwheel using a range of digital technologies was to scan the original wheel with a handheld infrared Asus Xtion camera, attached to a laptop computer via a USB cable. In order to perform the scan I needed to steadily pace around the object whilst holding both the scanner and the laptop simultaneously. This particular choreography needed to be enacted a number of times in order to capture areas that inexplicably failed to register on the digital model, no matter how slowly I patrolled or how diligently I swept the sensor over and around the subject. The cartwheel is not designed to stand freely in empty space with nothing supporting it. But it needed to stand unaided in order to be captured in one continuous scan. To achieve this optimal scan-ready posture for the wheel I constructed a relatively

unobtrusive jig consisting of floor chocks and a thin wooden shaft leading up to the central hub of the wheel. The 5-mm resolution of the Xtion scanner, coupled with the algorithms of the Skanect capturing software, resulted in a .stl file which I was then able to render physical by using an Ultimaker2 3D printer that extrudes polylactide (PLA) thermoset filament. The printer works best when creating objects about the size of two fists, so I decided to print the wheel with a diameter of 10 cm in order to play to the strengths of the tool and ensure the best print possible. However, proprietary software performs a number of adjustments in order to render a scan fit to print. In this case an array of support structures were added to the wheel’s typology in order to compensate for areas with undercuts and gaps. If not supported, the wheel would collapse mid-print. The location, quantity and qualities of the support material were decided entirely by the software; they are designed to be removed without trace from the finished model once printed. This support has a certain charm however. In a manner reminiscent of the ‘gifts of the kiln’ in pottery, it is an aesthetic gift from the machine: an inevitable yet uncontrollable random

architectural intervention, exacted upon a previously highly contrived and controlled CAD model. You think you know you what you are going to get out of a 3D printer, but more often than not, you do not. I wanted to create my full-size copy of the cartwheel with the support material in place. I wanted to pause the digital process in midstream, rendering physical this adaptation, with its compromises and ruination. Leaving the printed wheel’s support material in place, I then scanned it with a NextEngine 3D laser scanner. This allowed me to capture the wheel and its support material as one unified and complete object. The NextEngine creates high-resolution CAD files of small objects that are placed in front of it on an automated turntable. The resultant .stl file was then ready for processing in Fusion 360 software, readying it to be an instruction for a computer numerically controlled (CNC) milling machine. There are many variables at this stage. The choice of material stock, cutting bit, step depths and spindle speeds, for example, all make a difference to the quality of the work. Tweaking settings, running tests and nudging parameters can make the difference between it working or not.

Photos by Jon Stokes.

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I chose to use pink low-density polyurethane foam as my material stock from which to mill the digital ruin of a wheel. It is a material specifically designed for the machine I was using, beloved by model makers in industries such as architecture, aerospace, film, and Formula 1. It is lurid, smelly, relatively fragile, totally inappropriate for wheel making, and perfect for machining with a CNC mill. It does exactly what it is told to do: in this instance, to be a digital expression of a cartwheel. Zoe Laughlin is a designer, maker, materials engineer and broadcaster, exploring what she calls ‘the art and science of stuff’. At the heart of her work is ‘a desire to provide encounters with materials that strive to help us look at the world through a new lens and reveal the agency of matter’. She is the author, with Phil Howes, of the book Material Matters: New Materials in Design. She is a co-founder and director of the Institute of Making at University College London. She holds an MA from Central Saint Martins and a PhD from King’s College London. www.zoelaughlin.com www.instituteofmaking.org.uk

Re-Reading

T H E W H E E LW R I G H T â&#x20AC;&#x2122; S S H O P by PA D DY BU L L A R D

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VER THE COLD, gloomy new year of 1920, George Sturt sold out his share of the wheelwright’s shop at 84 East Street in the Surrey market town of Farnham. The business, which he had inherited from his father in 1884, had been declining for a while, but its sale became inevitable in 1916 when Sturt suffered a heart attack and temporary paralysis. The final lettinggo four years later still left him forlorn and nervy. ‘Yesterday the wages at my old shop were paid by the new firm’, he wrote in his journal on 10 January 1920. ‘This is the first week in 110 years, I think, that they have not been found by a member of my family’. Disburdened of the responsibility, however, Sturt had time to create a written memorial for 84 East Street, and the world of traditional skill he made it represent, that looks set to last far longer than the old business did. In May 1921, a little over a year later, he completed the manuscript of The Wheelwright’s Shop. As its centenary approaches, Sturt’s classic account of craft knowledge, rural environment and folk life seems more vibrant than ever. The book is not an obvious candidate for twenty-first century relevance. The Wheelwright’s Shop is about the trades of provincial waggon-makers, blacksmiths and carpenters, a set of peasant technologies that were Top: Front of a double-shafted waggon, 1919, illustrated in the 1923 edition of George

Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop plate V. Bottom: Side-view of a Surrey Farm Waggon, 1919, illustrated in the 1923 edition of George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop, plate IV. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.

SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL

becoming obsolete in the new century of the motor car. Sturt’s topics are rustic and antiquarian. They make no borrowings of medieval glamour from the decorative making of the Arts and Crafts movement (he distrusted the ‘fantastic reversions to old methods – so common now-a-days – which seem to aim at reviving traditions dead and gone’). The book focuses on the life-course of everyday vernacular culture, and some of its most common purposes: the making of dung carts, timber waggons and wheelbarrows. And yet Sturt’s handling of these themes is so subtle that theorists of material culture have taken a century to catch up with its intricacies. At first sight The Wheelwright’s Shop looks like a how-to book: a manual of handiwork, or a catalogue of mechanical forms and functions. But it contains barely a sentence of direct instruction. What Sturt describes instead is a complex network of relations between craftsmen, animals, landscapes and objects. He shows how these actors are drawn together into a common field of knowledge by human necessity, by human skill, and by human sensation. Above all, The Wheelwright’s Shop feels so modern today because, while its subject is everyday, its method is oblique. It tells a story, not of technical

triumph, but of how Sturt fell short of becoming a master craftsman. In the process of not quite managing to learn his trade, Sturt’s attention was educated into an extraordinary sensitivity to his materials, his place of work, the town it served, and the particular environment of woodland and farm-scape that surrounded it. The Wheelwright’s Shop is caught up, purposefully, with a further incongruity. The book belongs to a world of verbal and graphic representation that is at odds, as its author is always aware, with the para-literate, skills-based culture of knowledge that it records. This would have been a problem even if Sturt had been writing as a scientist or historian. But his background was in literature, and he was well aware of what it meant to construct a narrative around a workplace. The reader senses an anxiety that his familiarity with the world of letters disqualifies him from full knowledge of the world of craft. For five years Sturt had been a junior master at Farnham Grammar School before taking over his father’s shop in 1884, and afterwards continued to steal a precious hour early in the morning for ‘literary exercises – imitations of Thoreau or Emerson or Carlyle – anything that seemed to uplift me above the sordid cares (as I thought them) that

would come with daylight’. Literature prompted the move away from school teaching: Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera showed him ‘that man’s only decent occupation was handicraft’. But once he had committed himself to trade it was not long before his father’s old customers learned to distrust what he called ‘my book-learned ignorance, my simplicity, my Ruskinian absurdities’, and started to send work elsewhere. Sturt was 20 when he started working seriously in the shop, and in his journal he reckons he should have ‘begun developing the necessary cell-growth five years sooner’, in his early teens. At the most fundamental level he found that those years spent among books had blunted his capacity to acquire the skills practised unreflectingly by the workmen in his shop: ‘bookish training was too feeble to enter into these final secrets’, he wrote; ‘evidently there was something more, only revealed to skilled hands and eyes after years of experiment. Precision eluded me; my eyes didn’t see it’. Here as elsewhere he describes this elusive dimension of expertise in passive terms, as a matter of perception rather than conscious knowledge. These were ‘things for eyes and hands to learn, rather than for reason, and my eyes and hands were already too old’.

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In passages like these Sturt points to our double remove from the culture that he is recording. Its subtleties baffle even his perception, and the elusive knowledge of the craftsman dissolves further in the bookish milieu that we share with him as readers. But these acknowledgements are only the beginning of Sturt’s strategies for drawing us out into the disappearing world of the wheelwright. The first step he takes is to reassure us about the main difference between our book learning and the expertise of his workmen. For the latter, a degree of mystery was natural. Knowledge of craft could involve vast amounts of knowing, without very much knowing why: ‘and that is how most other men [in the shop] knew. The lore was a tangled network of country prejudices, whose reasons were known in some respects here, in others there, and so on’. The only way of getting at the dynamic of the craft is to give up approaching it from a technical direction, looking always for an instrumental rationale. One must see it instead within a broader perspective. Many years ahead of modern environmental thinking, Sturt shows us how to look as ecologists at the world of the rural wheelwright. ‘If one could know enough’, Sturt believed, ‘one might see, in ancient village crafts

like that of the sawyers, the reflection as it were of the peculiarities of the country-side – the difficulties and dangers, the daily conditions – to which those crafts were the answer’. The craft was a reflection of the environment, not a tool for tearing it apart. In this respect it was the craftsman’s raw materials that were his most important object of interpretation. It is for the mysteries of timber that Sturt reserves some of his most poetic writing. Traditional waggon-makers never steamed or bent their wood: every dish and bend in the limbs of a farm cart had been spotted in the growth of a living tree many years before. Splitting a crooked bough with beetle (pronounced ‘bittle’) and hammer so as to preserve that crookedness was a special art, animated by the woodman’s desire to see right into his material. With the wedges cleaving down between the living fibres – as he let out the wood-scent, listening to the tearing splitting sounds – the workman found his way into a part of our environment – felt the laws of woodland vitality – not otherwise visited or suspected. No professional person ever dreamt of this strange world; no sawyer ever got there. Intellect might hear of it; but the senses alone can know, and none may tell, what the world is like down there

in the grad [angle] of the oak butt, the fir-tree stamm [trunk]. A man must explore it for himself. Once again, the journey into the fibre of the timber corresponds with the journey outwards into the landscape, towards the woodlands, parklands and hedgerows from which the material had been cut. A misreading of the countryside might lead to felling the wrong sort of tree, and the harvesting of wood that was foxy-hearted – although this is a mistake that Sturt’s father or grandfather would never have made (‘they knew England in a more intimate way’). Sturt likes to describe this sort of environmental-technical knowledge, with a joke that seems full of meaning in the twenty-first century,: ‘often I have seen trees growing with exactly the right shape for shafts and have chuckled inwardly, admiring how accurately woodland nature seemed to know the shape of moving horses’. There was a serious point here: nature works in recirculating flows, every element of it an active agent. This is how to think about the knowledge of the wheelwright, according to Sturt. Understood properly, a farm waggon is a sort of photographic negative of the farmlands, woods and country lanes from which and for which it was made.

SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL

The knowledge that Sturt guides us towards is local, plotted out in micro-geographies of the Surrey hills and farmlands that stretch out from Farnham, of the town itself, and of the shop at 84 East Street, for which he provides a free-hand ground plan. But there are constant hints in Sturt’s language of wider prospects. The discovery of local territory corresponds with distant exploration and empire. The ‘strange world’ inside the tree, unknown to urban professionals but glimpsed in the wood yard, is one vector of this way of thinking. Another inversion of imperial scale is found in his repeated references to ‘the centuryold colonization of England’. Sturt uses the vast spaces of empire as a figure for the historical depth of the working environment that he describes. ‘The settling of this Island had only started about fifteen hundred years earlier’, he tells us, ‘and was still going on. It was no picnic. I was often tired to death of it’. When imagining his fellow workers as pioneer colonists he is usually thinking about the requirement that every pre-modern countryman faced, Crusoe-like, of using the things that he finds around him – ‘the timber, the clay, the wool’ – to survive. When it comes to introducing the end of this fifteen-hundred-year

process, and the advent of modernity, Sturt is again happy to let the metaphor fold in on itself. The pride and violence of empire are revealed, as his Surrey peasant-colonists and their rustic manufactures face a wave of unwelcome incursions. Catching sight of a stately old dung-waggon harnessed to a tractor, all trembling timbers and axles fretting, he feels ‘as if I were watching a slave subjected to insult and humiliation’. Then the image shifts: it was ‘as if some quiet old cottager had been captured by savages and was being driven to work on the public road’. Sturt’s journals show him as a trenchant anti-colonialist, and these images give a distinct impression of imperial anxieties at work in the conscience of a land-locked English observer. Modernity brought the reflux of the nation’s global advances to its own green homelands – something ‘more strange than emigration ever afforded … and yet it came to those of us who stayed at home’. The idea of the local acquires such depths of meaning in The Wheelwright’s Shop because these broader prospects are always present to the reader’s imagination. The other microgeography plotted by Sturt, the most local of all, is that of the craftsman’s body. The knowledge that he leads us towards

is profoundly personal, despite its being the inheritance and tradition of a community. That is why the two famous pen-portraits of his most accomplished workmen – the wheelwright George Cook and the blacksmith Will Hammond – have such weight. Of the former Sturt writes that he ‘never doubted, then or since, that his tiresome fastidiousness over tools and handiwork sprang from a knowledge as valid as any artist’s. He knew, not by theory, but more delicately, in his eyes and fingers’. Those eyes and fingers are instruments of sensation before they are instruments of making. The Wheelwright’s Shop is a careful record of the sensual experience of the woodyard, of its symmetries and sounds and smells, the wood-scent and the tearing of splitting timber, and the consciousness that these are experiences shared. With regard to the sounds of the shop, rhythm is especially important. One of Sturt’s earliest memories of work is being taught as a boy to fit a new hopper to a wooden barrel. It is a pleasant memory – the colour of the boards, the warm August afternoon, the sounds of hammering – my own hammering – thundering along the sleepy street; the intercourse, still

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at that time so strange to me, with the good-tempered confidence of a skilled workman. Hammering sets the beat for several of the most memorable passages of The Wheelwright’s Shop, perhaps because the action captures the blend of deftness, steadiness and power that the trade represents for Sturt. The point at which the spokes are sledge-hammered into the wheel-rim is a particular challenge to the writer’s skill of evocation, since ‘prose has no rhythm for it – no spring, no smashing blow recurrent at just the right place’. Sturt resorts in the end, not entirely successfully, to Miltonic inversions: the ‘work went on, tremendous’; the sledge was ‘hurled down on its mark, terrific’. His onomatopoeic descriptions often point to a diagnostic problem, as in the case of the ‘queer scrunching yet ringing chackle’ of a loose metal tyre in hot weather, or the ‘continuous click, clack, about twice as fast as the footfalls of a horse and regular as the ticking of a clock,’ that helps Sturt finally to understand the mystery of the ‘dish’ in the cartwheels that his shop made. If the wheels were flat they would have no resistance to the sideways sway of the cart-horse, which sends the cart knocking alternately against the side of either stock with

every step. The sound-world of The Wheelwright’s Shop takes on a peculiar poignancy when Sturt reveals that both Cook and Hammond were almost entirely deaf. Their isolation from the sounds of the shop seems to signal their total immersion in its processes and rhythms. Readers picking up The Wheelwright’s Shop today are better placed than ever to appreciate Sturt’s achievement. During the twentieth century the book was championed by liberal literary critics with strong social agendas. For F.R. Leavis and for his followers Denys Thompson, W.J. Keith and David Gervais, Sturt was a unique late witness to an English organic community, the memory of which might still provide a basis for criticism of industrial society. These arguments passed out of fashion with the rise of the New Left. Raymond Williams found in The Wheelwright’s Shop a story of cultural decline that distracted readers from the on-going struggles of the rural labouring classes. Sturt had a ‘foreshortened’ idea of working-class history, in Williams’s view, putting him on a level with the most sentimental contemporary country writers. Sturt’s journals show that he did indeed belong to a pluralistic Guild Socialist tradition at odds with the strong-

state Marxist centralism that Williams embraced. Today, though, there are other sorts of theorist – particularly those in the cognitive sciences, anthropology, and environmental studies – who can provide sympathetic frameworks for The Wheelwright’s Shop. It is becoming easier to appreciate Sturt’s vision of a culture of making in which skilled craftspeople work in a deep intimacy with materials, animals and landscapes. The environmental anthropology of Tim Ingold, with its focus on the embodied skills by which humans feel their way through the world’s material flows, is an especially illuminating companion to Sturt’s writing. So are recent explorations of the phenomenology of craft by writers like Richard Sennett, Matthew Crawford and Christopher Frayling. As The Wheelwright’s Shop approaches its centenary it seems to have become more pertinent than ever before. It is set to reclaim its place as a classic of romantic modernism. Paddy Bullard

Dr Paddy Bullard is Associate Professor, Director of Teaching and Learning for the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading.

SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL

Memorial stone for George Sturt, carved by Eric Gill. Photo by kind permission of St Andrewâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Church, Farnham.

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SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G O Early twentieth century wheelwright workshops. Photographs from the archive of The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading. P DX318 PH1_24_7 P DX263 PH1_B_1 P DX263 PH3_49 P DX263 PH3_51

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Adamson, Glenn (2018) Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects. London: Bloomsbury. Crawford, Matthew (2010) The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Evans, George Ewart (1956) Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. London: Faber.

Sturt, George (1923) The Wheelwright’s Shop. Cambridge: Home Farm Books. Sturt, George (1941) The Journals of George Sturt ‘George Bourne’ 1890 – 1902 (Grigson, Geoffrey, ed.). London: Cresset Press. Williams, Raymond (1973) The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus.

Howes, Philip and Laughlin, Zoe (2012) Material Matters: New Materials in Design. London: Black Dog. Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Psychology Press. Leavis, F.R. and Thompson, Denys (1933) Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus. Ruskin, John (1871) Fors Clavigera. Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (Birch, Dinah, ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sennett, Richard (2008) The Craftsman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sturt, George (1912) Change in the Village. Amazon: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

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Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s Curator: Dr Glenn Adamson Organising Curators, Crafts Study Centre: Professor Simon Olding and Greta Bertram Organising Curators, The Museum of English Rural Life: Isabel Hughes and Dr Oliver Douglas Conservation: The Museum of English Rural Life: Fred van de Geer Administration, Crafts Study Centre: Margaret Madden and Ingrid Stocker Installation, Crafts Study Centre: Messum’s Wiltshire Photography of makers and studios: Jon Stokes Photography, The Museum of English Rural Life: Laura Bennetto Picture research, The Museum of English Rural Life: Caroline Benson Transport: Messums’s Wiltshire, Greg Rowland and The Museum of English Rural Life Design: David Hyde

Shoulder to the Wheel is a partnership project between the Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts and The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading. Crafts Study Centre, 10th September to 14th December 2019 The Museum of English Rural Life, 14th January to 5th April 2020 The exhibition has been supported by funds from Arts Council England, directed towards Farnham Craft Town’s October craft month programme. Funds for the catalogue have been awarded from the 2019/2020 Research Fund of the University for the Creative Arts.

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