Medieval bequest helps aspiring goldsmiths

The Times, 20/8/2011

By Simon Tait

The fall in the number of courses for the young has caused dismay

Some astute property management by the wife of a medieval goldsmith is helping to ensure the future of his craft, more than six centuries after his death.

Robert Harding, or Hardyng, had a long and prosperous life, living to be almost 80 mixing his craft as a goldsmith with property dealing, and holding property in Surrey and Essex, and possibly Kent, Norfolk and Buckinghamshire, as well as in the City. In 1489 he was Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company, and in 1498 he was elected a Sheriff of the City. He died in 1503.

Agas, or Agnes, Harding was his widow and in her will of 1514 she left a small bequest to the Company in her husband’s memory, a plot of land between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane, just north of Fleet Street. Leaseholders developed the land, putting tenements and gardens on it in the mid-17th century when New Street was created.

After the Great Fire of 1666 the neighbourhood became a lively trading area and in the 19th century printers, publishers and newspapers settled around the Harding bequest. Now it is called New Street Square, 700,000 square feet of office and retail space in five buildings, worth £17.5m.

This is the source of the funding that is creating the Goldsmiths’ Centre and Institute, that will open not far away in Clerkenwell in October. A charitable enterprise, it is the company’s biggest single investment in its 700 year history and its most important educational initiative since it founded Goldsmiths’ College in New Cross in 1891. “The company has watched with dismay the rapid reduction in the number of courses available to young people wanting to make a career in the sector,” said Martin Drury, chairman of the new centre’s trustees, a former director general of the National Trust and a recent Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths. ”The vocational courses the polytechnics offered have closed and no pre-apprenticeship courses in silversmithing and jewellery are now offered in the London metropolitan area.”

The centre’s director, Peter Taylor – an enamellist by training who set up the Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre in his home city of Birmingham ten years ago – is determined to reverse the trend, with layers of operations on the five floors.

The centre, partly in a listed Victorian board school, Eagle Court, and partly on the site a 1960s cookery school, is in a district that had become a Dickensian slum at the time newspapers were beginning to populate Robert Harding’s bequest. The land, behind Farringdon Station, is owned by the London Development Agency which is anxious to revive the area. The Goldsmiths have a 125 year lease with an option on the freehold, and the new centre will open in October.

Standing on the edge of the Hatton Garden jewellery quarter and in the traditional watchmaking neighbourhood of London, the institute within the centre will provide pre-apprenticeship training in silversmithing, jewellery-making and design in fully-equipped workshops. Eight to ten young people aged between 16 and 19 will be employed for a year, and the course will act as a feeder for the Goldsmiths’ own apprenticeship scheme.

It will also offer an intense one or two year course in professional design for post-graduates, as well as short courses for established goldsmiths. Other workshops will be available for hire at affordable rents by craftspeople just setting up business. Too many fail in their early years because of the cost of rents in suitable centres the idea is that that the proximity of commercial and educative operations would be mutually beneficial. “We will get them involved in the educational aspects by offering them rebates on their rents if they help with the teaching,” Taylor said, “so that we will create a community, not just a facility”.

The centre will also have exhibition space and conference facilities available for hire, and a publicly accessible café, raising revenue which will be ploughed back into the fully independent centre.

The initiative is a radical departure for the Goldsmiths who have preserved a non-interventionist policy, said Peter Taylor, until the growing paucity of properly trained jewellery and precious metal craftspeople demanded a more direct response.

“The unique nature of our membership combined with our history and financial resources means that we are the only organisation that is in the position to make this bold step,” he said. “We believe that the Goldsmiths’ Institute will be uniquely equipped to take on this challenge and to respond to the serious issues faced within craft and design education for our sector.”