From ceramics to silversmithing, calligraphy to textiles, hot glass to bookbinding, crafts have played a complex role in the social, cultural and artistic history of twentieth-century Britain. This book is the first to examine the full range of individual craft disciplines and key practitioners from the Arts and Crafts Movement before the first World War to the end of the 1980s.

Tanya Harrod shows how the crafts movement emerged as a response to a more generalised anxiety about the production, commodification and consumption of objects in a highly industrialised society. Caught between the more powerful disciplines of fine art, architecture and design for industry, the crafts have defined and redefined themselves-throughout the century and been put to the service of many ideals and ideologies.

Historians, educationalists, craftsmen and women, artists and collectors, and readers with an interest in British cultural history will find this handsomely illustrated book poses fresh, unexpected questions.