What Is an Artisan Blacksmith?

Follow a muddy track behind a tiny Suffolk cottage, back in 2006, and you would have found Richard in a garden shed, lit by a single bare light bulb, hammering hot iron into shape. That shed is where Made by the Forge began. Richard is an artisan blacksmith: a craftsperson who heats iron in a raging hot forge then shapes it by hand using a hammer on an anvil. He started out making items that were both useful and beautiful. People often ask us what that word “artisan” really means, so I thought I would tell you, from the inside of a working forge.

What Is an Artisan Blacksmith?

An artisan blacksmith is a craftsperson who shapes iron and steel by hand, using a forge, hammer and anvil. Unlike factory-made metalwork, every piece is individual. The hammer marks are not mistakes. They are the signature of the maker.

That last part is the whole difference. When a blacksmith takes a piece of metal and then heats it up and can read the colour as it shifts from red to orange to yellow, and then decides where each hammer blow lands this is pure skill which has been learnt over years of practice. This means that no two pieces are ever quite alike, and the little marks left by the hammer are left there on purpose. That is what makes it artisan.

Richard has been doing this for nearly three decades, and he is unapologetic about why. “I love metal. I am passionate about keeping blacksmithing skills alive.” He is our founder blacksmith and Managing Director, and Made by the Forge and Nigel Tyas now have a small team of incredibly talented blacksmiths with varying degrees of experience. You can read a little more about him and the rest of us on our Meet the Team page.

Here is my favourite proof that this is real, old craft and not a marketing story. We have a number of anvils and all our blacksmiths forge on these but we have one particular one which came from Shrubland Hall, a Suffolk house built in 1770. The blacksmith’s shop there kept that anvil for centuries before it was sold at auction. Richard bought it from a farmer who had picked it up at the sale, along with an old hand-bellows forge, and he refused to separate the two. “After all,” he said, “they have probably worked together for several hundred years, so who am I to split them up?” We have told that story at length in If Only My Anvil Could Talk. When one of our blacksmiths raises their hammer they are the latest pair of hands in a long line of Suffolk smiths working on that anvil.

From Farrier to Forge

Before there was Made by the Forge, there was a horse. Richard trained as a farrier first and in 1994 he began a 4 year long apprenticeship to learn the art of shoeing a horse. He has never stopped. “Farriery was my first love,” he says. “Horse shoeing is a wonderful skill and something that prepared me for crafting items out of metal for the home.”

That is not a quirky footnote. It is where the craft comes from. Farriery and decorative ironwork lean on the very same things: fire, a forge, a hammer, an anvil and an understanding of how hot metal behaves under the blow. The only real difference is what the metal becomes at the end. As Richard likes to point out about the Shrubland Hall anvil, “it would have been used for making horse shoes and at other times mending farm implements or other items. The same anvil, blacksmith hands, the same fire.

The two trades are close cousins, but they are not the same job. They formally separated in Britain under the Farriers (Registration) Act 1975, which made it an offence for anyone unqualified to shoe a horse, precisely to protect the animals from harm. Farriery is still a small and tightly held trade. The Farriers Registration Council’s Annual Report 2025 records just 39 people qualifying through the apprenticeship that year. So when a blacksmith is also a working farrier it means holding two full sets of skills and knowing metal both as something you fit into a home and as something fitted to a living, moving animal.

I think that depth of knowledge is worth knowing about when you buy from us. If you would like the fuller version of how we got from a garden shed to a Suffolk forge, Pete the vet’s first order and all, you can read it in our story.

What Does an Artisan Blacksmith Make?

Here is a happy myth to correct. When people picture a blacksmith, they often think of swords and knives. Blade-making is its own separate specialism, and a beautiful one, but it is not what most artisan blacksmiths spend their days doing. The real work, ours included, is ironwork for the home and garden.

Made by the Forge’s small team of blacksmiths makes made-to-order wrought iron curtain poles and finials, kitchen hardware like hanging pan racks and rails, stair handrails, coat hooks and all manner of pieces for our wider homeware range. Everything is forged to order and finished by hand in one of two ways: Matt Black Paint, or Natural Beeswax that lets the grain of the metal show through.

An artisan blacksmith can work at real scale too, when the commission calls for it. After we exhibited in London one year and came home with, memorably, two pounds left in the bank, we got a phone call from Will Hobhouse, then Chairman of Heal’s. He asked us to design and make the Farrier’s Cage chandeliers for the Heal’s store on Tottenham Court Road. It is still one of our proudest moments. We have also run The Forge Project, inviting the product designers Anthony Dickens, Chris Eckersley, Gareth Neal and William Warren to Suffolk to design and hand-craft a light apiece. Anthony summed up the artisan ethos better than I could: “useful objects, that serve a purpose, which are beautifully designed.”

Recognition for this kind of work has grown alongside the wider craft revival. In 2025, Richard was named one of Country Living’s 40 Best Artisans, an award run with Dame Emma Bridgewater as patron and given to potters, weavers, cheesemakers and blacksmiths alike. That tells you where the artisan blacksmith sits today. Not as a relic, but as part of a living tradition of British makers doing things properly, by hand.

The Village Blacksmith: A 2,500-Year-Old Trade

To understand what an artisan blacksmith is, it helps to know how far back the trade goes. Blacksmithing has been part of British life for roughly 2,500 to 3,000 years. Heritage Crafts dates the arrival of the craft in Britain to around 450 BC, and archaeologists have gone further still. A 2,700-year-old Iron Age smithy unearthed in Oxfordshire, dated to between 770 and 515 BC, showed specialist smiths were already at work at the very dawn of the Iron Age.

For most of those centuries, the village blacksmith was the beating heart of the community. The old smith was, as one lovely account puts it, “not only a blacksmith and farrier, but, at times, wheelwright, carpenter, tinker, veterinary surgeon, doctor, dentist, sportsman and many other things.” The forge was warm, bright and always busy, and people gathered there. It was the workshop that made and mended almost everything a village needed: horseshoes, nails, locks, tools, farm implements.

Most of those forges are gone now. Heritage Crafts records that the village blacksmith “almost disappeared after the Second World War with the advent of mechanisation on the land”, and the old smithies have mostly become garages, workshops or homes. A small number of us carry the trade on. We are proud to be keeping it alive here in Suffolk, and if you would like to read more about the history of the village forge, we have written about it in Your Village Blacksmith.

Handmade vs. Mass-Produced: Why It Matters

None of this heritage would matter much if hand-forged ironwork were simply a dearer way to buy the same thing. It isn’t, and this is where the difference becomes practical rather than sentimental.

Most metal homeware on the high street is stamped from thin sheet steel, cast in a mould, or bolted together from factory parts. It is efficient, it is cheap, and every piece is identical to the last. What it cannot give you is character or real strength. Cast iron, poured into a mould, is brittle and cracks under a knock. Hand-forged bar is different at the level of the metal itself. Repeated hammer blows on hot iron pack the grain in tight, so forged parts carry around 37% higher fatigue strength than equivalent cast ones. In plain terms, it is stronger and it lasts.

And it does last. Skilled wrought ironwork survives for centuries. There are three-hundred-year-old iron gates still standing in the stately homes of this country, and a peer-reviewed RICS Built Environment Journal article cites Okeover ironwork from 1717 as “still showing good condition after 300 years.” That is why we offer a lifetime guarantee as standard. A hand-forged curtain pole that outlives its owner is hardly an expense next to a factory pole you replace every decade. It is the “buy once” idea, made solid.

There is a quiet green thread running through all of this too. Iron is endlessly recyclable, our Natural Beeswax finish is genuinely natural, and buying something that lasts is the least wasteful thing you can do. We also plant a tree for every single order, over 20,000 so far, through our tree-planting pledge.

None of this is old-fashioned nostalgia, either. British buyers are actively seeking it out. Barclays research from 2025 found 71% of consumers want to support UK businesses by buying more products made in Britain, with one in eight willing to pay a premium of around 22% for locally made goods. We felt that pull ourselves years ago, which is why we stayed 100% British made and, more recently, brought the Nigel Tyas Ironwork forge from Yorkshire into our Suffolk workshop. Another British craft tradition kept alive rather than lost.