From Lord of the Rings to Lord of the Spreadsheet – How Magic Lost Its Wonder.

Written and read by Vincent Shaw

Earlier this year, for World Book Day, I stood in front of two hundred and twenty children and five teachers and asked them a simple question.

What is magic, and where does it come from?

As the presentation was for eleven-year-olds, I kept things simple by keeping the central premise around the idea that magic could be thought of as a catch-all word to explain things and events that defy rational explanation, and how, over the centuries, magic evolved into the sciences. Alchemy became chemistry, astrology became astronomy, and so on. (You can read that article here.)

In reality, magic is of course an extremely broad and nuanced topic and beyond the scope of this essay. Broadly speaking, magic was a human and deeply personal invention. It was analogical and rooted in the conviction that the world was alive with hidden sympathies and correspondences. Two things that look alike are alike. Two things that had once been in contact were always in contact. If you wanted to heal someone, you found a plant that resembled the afflicted organ. If you wanted to harm someone, you made an image of them and stuck pins in it. Magic was never rational, but it was logical, according to the human condition and world thinking at the time, and that thinking and definition of magic has evolved over time.

In a nutshell, magic was a method to address a human need when other rational mechanisms were unavailable or simply didn’t work. Heal me, protect me, find me love. Tell me who stole my pig. Make it rain. The list is endless. Essentially, magic was seen as a force that could be called upon when something was out of, or beyond, human control. As magic evolved into science, and science enabled greater control, magic simply became redundant.

I would argue that the decline in a belief of magic, ran parallel to a decline in faith. But now, as the world becomes increasingly dangerous and events move beyond the control of ordinary people, so once again we are seeing belief in magic increase, and faith strengthen. But that is an essay for another day.

But as far as practical magic, for want of a better phrase, evolved, it became the sciences, but a belief in magic did not disappear entirely. Magic found its way into fairy stories.

Fairy tale magic is wild. It is arbitrary and unexplained, and is ruled by an internal logic that never announces itself. Beans for a cow. A kiss breaks a curse. Spin straw into gold or die. You don’t know why these things work, they just do. The story doesn’t explain because it doesn’t need to.

But fairy tale magic, for all its wildness, is not amoral. It is deeply and consistently moral – it just refuses to announce its rules in advance. In Perrault’s ‘The Fairies,’ a kind girl gives water to a disguised fairy and finds jewels falling from her lips whenever she speaks. Her rude sister refuses, and is cursed with toads and snakes. In Grimm’s Cinderella, the stepsisters’ vanity is rewarded by doves pecking out their eyes. The discovery of his true name, breaks Rumpelstiltskin’s power, because in the folk tradition, to name something is to hold authority over it.

In fairy tale magic, the virtuous character is rewarded and the wicked, punished. The magic rewards generosity and punishes transgression, but it does so on its own terms. You cannot predict it, game it, or learn it in order to exploit it.

What fairy tale magic is not, however, is sacred. Fundamentally it is pagan in nature. Fairy tale magic is above and beyond not only the character’s, but the reader’s comprehension. It answers to a justice they cannot understand. It has has no named source and no cosmology or omnipotent creator behind it. The morality is real but it is tethered to the individual story, and only applicable within it.

This matters because of who came next – Tolkien.

Others had been there before him of course, George MacDonald was one. He was a Scottish minister whose fairy tales carried the weight of faith, was acknowledged by Tolkien as a forerunner. But MacDonald’s magic was sacred within the frame of a parable. Tolkien did something else entirely. He created a world whose moral architecture made every act of magic legible. It was either good and sacred or evil and corrupted. Faithful or fallen. In Middle-earth, magic was a reflection of the world’s making or the rebellion against it.

Fundamentally, Tolkien made magic sacred.

In Middle-earth, magic is not a system to be learned. It is not a skill to be practised, or a resource to be spent and replenished. It is a quality of being, something closer to grace than to individual power, and it cannot be separated from the moral and spiritual architecture of the world in which it operates.

Gandalf can and does use spells. He produces light from his staff, breaks the Bridge of Khazad-dûm with a word of command. But Tolkien never explains his power. There is no spell list, no progression, no sense that Gandalf’s abilities follow rules the reader could learn. You never know what he can or cannot do. The mystery is preserved, even when the magic is on full display. He was sent, not trained. And when he falls in Moria, he is not rescued by his own cleverness or by another character’s intervention. He dies as a direct result of battling evil. He is then resurrected and sent back. The parallel is obvious.

And the word ‘sent’ carries the entire weight of what underpins magic in Middle-earth. Power in Middle-earth is not seized. It is received. The moment you try to seize it, you have already begun the fall.

That is why the Ring cannot be wielded for good. Not because of some arbitrary rule that Tolkien imposed for dramatic convenience, but because the logic of the world makes it impossible. The Ring is domination made physical. To use it, even with the best of intentions, is to accept domination as a method, and in Tolkien’s world, the method is the meaning. There is no version of events in which Gandalf or Galadriel takes the Ring and uses its power for noble ends, because the act of using that kind of power is in itself the corruption. In Middle-earth, magic is not a system. It is the foundation of the world.

The Elves understand magic instinctively. In Lothlórien, when Sam asks about ‘Elf magic,’ the response is one of genuine confusion. The Elves do not distinguish between magic and craft, between enchantment and making, between the numinous quality of a thing and the skill with which it was made. To them, it is all one. A rope woven by Elvish hands has properties that Sam would call magical, but the Elves would simply call it, good rope. This is not vagueness on Tolkien’s part. It is precision. He is telling us that in a world where making is sacred, there is no boundary between the made, and the enchanted – magic.

And the magic of Middle-earth is in everything.

Tom Bombadil teaches the hobbits a spell before they cross the Barrow-downs, although he doesn’t call it a spell, and the reader might not recognise it as such. He gives them a rhyme to chant if they need his help. And when Tom rescues the hobbits from the barrow-wight, his counter-magic is to dig up the treasure and give it away. That is how you defeat a barrow-wight: you break the hoard. To a reader raised on fireballs and lightning bolts, none of this looks like magic at all, but it is. It is magic as the real world practised it for thousands of years, a magic rooted in folk knowledge and sympathetic correspondence, and the conviction that certain acts performed in certain ways, have power.

Aragorn heals with Athelas, a herb whose other name is Kingsfoil, because the king’s hands heal. This is not a fantasy invention. It is a direct inheritance from the real-world tradition of the royal touch, the belief that the anointed monarch carried a divine healing power. Tolkien takes this ancient tradition and places it at the heart of his story. Aragorn cannot heal because he has learned a skill. He can heal because he is the king, and the king’s authority is not political. It is sacred – the divine right of kings. Again, the parallel is obvious.

And then there are the holy names. When Frodo, on the verge of death on Weathertop, instinctively cries out Elbereth Gilthoniel, the name itself repels the Nazgûl. When Sam faces Shelob in the darkness of Cirith Ungol, the same name causes the Phial of Galadriel to blaze with light. Elbereth is Varda, the Queen of the Stars, the greatest of the Valier, the most revered of all the Valar. Frodo and Sam are not casting spells. They are calling out to the divine, and being answered. The name works not because of any magical property inherent in the word, but because of the divine entity it calls.

This is the point at which the underlying faith within The Lord of the Rings becomes impossible to ignore. The magic in Middle-earth behaves the way faith behaves – often as prayer answered.

The Ainulindalë, the creation myth of Middle-earth, is not a spell. It is a song, a great music in which each voice contributes its part to a theme set by Ilúvatar. And the discord of Melkor is woven into the pattern rather than erased from it, because even rebellion serves the greater design. This is the logic of a world that means something, a world underwritten by a greater purpose that the characters can sense even, though they cannot see it.

And the divine, as the source of magic, is what makes Tolkien’s magic feel so very different, in fiction, from all the magic that came after.

Magic in Middle-earth is the power of received grace. That is why it nourishes the reader.

And then we turned magic it into a spreadsheet.

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published Dungeons & Dragons, and after D&D hit the shelves, magic in fantasy changed forever. The motivation that drove the game’s invention was the love of Middle-earth and The Lord of the Rings – two people trying to find a way of returning to, and having a more complete experience inside, that world.

D&D was a remarkable sideways step into the imaginative landscape. It was a new way for people to inhabit fantasy worlds, and to do so together. But a game requires rules. That is the nature of a game. You cannot have a player announce ‘I cast a spell’, and then spend forty minutes debating whether their character has sufficient moral authority to make it work. (Actually you can. I was that argumentative teenager, but that is a different story.) You cannot have magic in a game, without having some kind of determining mechanism, which for D&D, was the polyhedral dice. The dice, along with spreadsheets, can track levels, ranges, power and duration. And this became magic’s determining mechanism.

So, due to the invention of a game, magic had to become quantifiable. Spells needed categories, levels, ranges, durations. A fireball had to do a specific amount of damage to a specific target at a specific range. Magic became, for the first time in the history of storytelling, a resource to be managed. And within the logic of the game, it works. It has to. The alternative is an unplayable game, and chaos.

But the mechanics of game magic didn’t stay inside the games.

Game magic, and its quantifiable mechanism, bled into fiction, slowly at first and then completely.

Over the following decades, fantasy novels increasingly treated magic as a system. Writers built elaborate frameworks: materials that granted specific powers when ingested, energy sources that could be drawn upon and depleted, magical disciplines with rules as rigid as the laws of physics. The reader’s pleasure shifted. It moved away from the wonder of the divine, toward the satisfaction of watching an elegant mechanism working, and leading to a reward-based outcome.

Entire schools of thought emerged around this idea. Writers taught other writers that a magic system was only satisfying to the degree that the reader understood its constraints, that the resolution of a fantasy novel should depend on the protagonist’s insight into how the magic works. That mystery in magic was a flaw to be engineered out, not a quality to be preserved. And a generation of readers and writers grew up believing that this is simply what magic in fantasy is: a system with rules, a mechanism to be understood. That encroachment of rules-based magic into fiction, has now reached the point where it is a fiction genre in its own right – LitRPG (Literary Role Playing Games), stories where game mechanics and narrative literally coexist on the page.

All these different forms of magic can be found in countless books, and they work very well. A well-constructed magic system can be genuinely thrilling. The pleasure of watching a clever character exploit the laws of a fictional world is real. Many of these books are quality, well-written works, and the people who love them are not wrong to do so. But something was lost, and I would argue that most readers can sense it – that as good as these books are, they do not come close to the experience that The Lord of the Rings delivers.

I think what was lost, was spiritual depth.

A well-crafted magic system entertains. It engages the mind. It provides the pleasure of pattern recognition and the satisfaction of a reward-based outcome. But it does not nourish emotional or spiritual hunger. It does not leave you, at the end of the story, feeling that you have been in the presence of something that touches absolute truth, something greater than simply words on a page.

Tolkien’s magic nourishes that spiritual hunger. In my opinion, that is why people return to The Lord of the Rings time and time again. They return so they can re-engage with something that can be deeply felt and does not diminish with rereading. This feeling is best illustrated by Samwise Gamgee in Mordor.

‘There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.’

This passage never fails to move me. Why? Because it touches upon an absolute truth, and I am certain that I am not alone. In my view, that is what is missing from so much contemporary fantasy fiction, and why magic in fantasy is now unsatisfying, no matter how many fireballs you cast.

Sam seeing the Star of Eärendil is moving because it represents the entire architecture of Tolkien’s legendarium: the Silmarils, the Two Trees, the light that existed before the sun and moon, Varda who set the stars in the sky, the whole cosmology of a world made in love and marred by pride and sustained by grace. Sam doesn’t know any of this. He just sees a star. But the reader senses that spiritual foundation, even if they have never read the Silmarillion. The reader feels it because the world Tolkien built is founded on faith, hope, and truth.

A magic system rests on its own internal logic. When the logic is exhausted, when the reader has understood all the rules, the wonder is spent and the spreadsheet is complete.

Tolkien’s magic flows from the divine. That is why the passage where Sam sees the Star of Eärendil is so moving, even on its twentieth reading.

I stood in front of two hundred and twenty children and asked them where magic comes from. The answer I gave them that day was the one that fits on a classroom whiteboard: magic became science. Chemistry was once alchemy. We learned to explain the world and the magic receded.

But the question I have been turning over ever since, is a different one. Not where does magic come from in the world, but where does it come from in the stories we tell, and why does it land so deeply in some stories and not in others?

I think the answer is that the most satisfying magic in fiction was never really about magic at all. It was about what sits behind it. One upon a time, fairy tales gave us magic that was strange and beautiful, and it thrilled us, but Tolkien moved beyond this.

Tolkien gave us magic that was an founded on truth, and that is impossible to improve upon.

From King Arthur to Hogwarts - what every generation hungers for.

Written and read by Vincent Shaw

Around two years ago, a very elderly aunt told me that my grandmother had been given a gold sovereign by the Pre-Raphaelite artist, William Morris. I burst into tears on the spot.

The tears surprised me. I’m a man in his sixties, and I was weeping because of a coin that may, or may not have existed, given by a man who died more than a century ago. After a great deal of thought, I realised the tears weren’t about the sovereign – they were about connection. The full story can be found here.

I have spent my whole life admiring the work of William Morris and loving the work Edward Burne-Jones. The tapestries, the stained glass, the paintings and the medieval dreamworld they created, and I had absolutely no knowledge that my own family, in a very small way, had been part of it.

My great-great-grandfather Robert, knew William Morris well. He owned the Marylebone Glassworks in London, and made stained glass windows for Morris and Company. His sisters, my great-great-aunts, were cloth stainers who worked for Morris and lived above the very first Morris & Co shop at 449, Oxford Street.

After sixty years of ignorance, I could not believe that I had a direct connection with some of the men I admired the most. For me, it was total shock and an impossible dream come true, I was connected – hence the tears.

What I didn’t understand then, but think I understand now, is why I so desperately wanted to be connected to them. Morris, Burne-Jones and many other Pre-Raphaelite artists were reaching for something – they were reaching for the romance and beauty that can only be found, in fairy tales.

Without knowing it, that is what I had also been reaching for all my life, and now with greater insight, that is what I will continue to do until I no longer draw breath.

But I am not alone. That reaching, that searching has been going on for centuries.

In 1839, a young Scottish nobleman named Archibald Montgomerie, the 13th Earl of Eglinton, staged a medieval tournament on his estate in Ayrshire. Real armour. Real lances. Real horses. A hundred thousand spectators came to watch, many of them in costume. Unfortunately, the Scottish weather had other ideas, and it poured with rain for the entire tournament and the whole thing descended into a magnificent, glorious muddy shambles – knights and horses slipping in mud, pavilions collapsing, spectators drenched – but nobody seemed to mind. The desire, the longing to be part of the romance was bigger than the disaster and came to be known as the Eglinton Tournament.

Mark Girouard, in his wonderful book The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, traces this desire back to its roots. What he found was not nostalgia in the way we understand it – a sentimental longing for a lost golden age – but something deeper. A hunger, an ache. The Victorians were reaching for something their age was rapidly destroying. The very beauty and romance they believed in.

Victorian Britain was the richest, most powerful civilisation on earth – at the time – and it was spiritually eating itself alive. The Industrial Revolution had delivered extraordinary wealth, but it had done so by stripping out everything that made life feel meaningful.

The human hand was replaced by the factory line. Towns that had grown organically over centuries were demolished and rebuilt as engines of production. The air was black, the rivers were dead. Beauty was replaced by ugly efficiency. Romance was being replaced by the accounting ledger, which in turn meant that man had less value, than machine.

And in the middle of this, a group of artists and writers looked at what their age had built and found it spiritually and morally bankrupt. So they searched for those lost values by reaching into the past.

Morris looked for it in medieval craft – in the hand-printed book, the hand-woven tapestry, the hand-thrown pot. Burne-Jones (along with many other Pre-Raphaelite artists), looked for it in Arthurian legend, painting knights and enchanted forests with a luminosity that made the industrial world outside, the aberration, not the dream. Tennyson looked for it in verse, rewriting the Arthurian cycle for a generation that desperately wanted to believe that honour, beauty, and selflessness were still possible.

And they weren’t alone, and they weren’t the first. Others had gone before them. Sir Walter Scott and Kenelm Digby had already rekindled the flame – Scott through his novels of medieval chivalry, Digby through The Broad Stone of Honour, a hugely influential book that reimagined the knightly code as a living ethos for the modern gentleman. The desire to reach back did not begin with Morris and Burne-Jones. It had been building for decades.

Morris and Burne-Jones reached back to King Arthur and the medieval, not because the Middle Ages were better – Morris, of all people, knew they weren’t – but because the medieval world contained something their own age had thrown away. A belief that making things with your hands mattered. That beauty was not a luxury but a necessity. That the measure of a civilisation was not taken by what it produced, but by what it cared about.

And here is the thing that matters most. They didn’t just admire the past, they were inspired by it. Morris didn’t want to live in the Middle Ages. He wanted to make wallpaper, furniture, and stained glass with the same care and conviction that medieval craftsmen had brought to their work. Burne-Jones didn’t want to be a medieval knight. He wanted to step inside the myth – to paint Avalon so vividly that the world outside his studio, disappeared. The past was never the destination, it was the romantic inspiration.

My great-great-grandfather Robert was part of that movement. He made stained glass windows for Morris and Company, but not just churches, but for homes too, handmade whilst the factories of industrial England roared around him. The only surviving examples of his work are in a small parish church around the corner from my house in Sussex. I lived ten minutes away from them for a decade without knowing they existed. The full story can be found here.

I own a copy of Girouard’s book. It came from and was published in the USA, and I have read it countless times. But one passage stopped my heart the first time I encountered it, and it has stayed with me for forty years.

On page ninety-five, Girouard describes Charles Lamb – not the essayist, but a young Victorian aristocrat preparing for the Eglinton Tournament. Earlier that summer, Lamb had rented a house outside Bognor Regis on the Sussex coast, for the races at nearby Goodwood, and one day had come across a fourteen-year-old girl wandering on the Bognor Sands. She was in deep distress. Her employer, an Indian rajah, was trying to seduce her. Lamb, in the full grip of the chivalric code he tried to live by, rescued her. Her name was Charlotte Gray, the daughter of a draper in nearby Chichester, and she was very beautiful, with coal-black hair that fell to her feet when she let it down. Charles became her faithful knight.

I have walked those sands. I still walk them. The book arrived from three thousand miles away and opened onto a scene on the beach I have been walking on, all my life.

The goose bump feeling I had on reading about Charles Lamb and Charlotte Gray, was the same feeling I had on discovering that my great-great-grandfather’s windows still existed around the corner from my home. The past is not behind us. It surrounds us, it’s beneath our feet and it’s in our bones. It is in the stories we tell our children and the things we make with our hands. It is the thread that connects a Victorian glassmaker in London to his great-great-grandson in Sussex. We are not separated from the past. We are made of it. It binds us to one another across generations, and when we feel that connection, often unconsciously, we sense we are part of something greater – a never-ending story. A story that started before we existed and that will continue, after we die.

The chivalric revival that Girouard examines in his book did not survive the First World War. It couldn’t. The generation that had been raised on King Arthur and honour, and the playing fields of Eton, walked into the trenches of the Somme and discovered that chivalry was no protection against industrialised killing. The medieval dream that had sustained a century of British self-belief, was destroyed.

What replaced it, was silence. A generation of men who had seen what they had seen and could not speak of it in the old language. Chivalry – honour, glory, sacrifice – had lost its meaning, destroyed by the reality of what those words had actually demanded.

But that deep ache, that hunger for something beyond the present, was not destroyed by the war. The hunger for romance, for beauty, for moral certainty, did not die. It lives in and thrives in the hearts of us all and it is impossible to destroy.

Two men who survived the First World War spent the rest of their lives reaching back into the past. Not this time for inspiration, but for ‘recovery.’ And they reached back further this time, back beyond the medieval and the romance of King Arthur. Further, deeper, to the roots beneath the roots.

One of them was J.R.R. Tolkien, a philologist, a scholar, and a man who fought in the terrible battle of the Somme. Before he was a novelist, he was one of the foremost scholars of Beowulf, the oldest epic poem in the English language. It is the tale of a hero who knows that despite defeating the monster, he will lose in the end. Tolkien understood that Beowulf was not a literary curiosity, but a living thing, that still had something to teach a world that had just tried to destroy itself.

Tolkien reached back to Beowulf, to Norse saga, to the deep mythological roots of northern Europe, and he built Middle-earth. Not as escapism, but for what he called ‘recovery,’ a way of seeing things clearly again by seeing them through an older lens. Middle-earth is not a world of warriors. It is a world of creators and craftsmen – Elvish smiths who forge with patience and love, Dwarven miners who find beauty in stone, Hobbits who garden and cook and build with their hands – craftsmen who have to put down their tools to fight, and who long for nothing more than to pick those tools up again.

The other man was C.S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend and fellow survivor of the war. He reached back to medieval romance, to classical mythology. He built Narnia – a place where children step through a wardrobe and find themselves in a world where virtue matters, and where good and evil are real and distinguishable. Lewis believed, and wrote explicitly, that the modern world’s rejection of objective beauty and moral truth, what he called ‘the abolition of man,’ was a catastrophe that would leave us with nothing to stand on. Narnia was his answer, his ‘recovery.’

Both men were doing exactly what Morris and Burne-Jones had done a generation earlier. They looked at what their age had lost, and they went looking for it in older stories. The romance of the past was the raw material. Middle-earth and Narnia were the handmade result.

But between the Pre-Raphaelites and Tolkien, between the Victorian revival and the post-war recovery, something else happened. Something that changed the terms of the argument.

Modernism arrived as a reaction to the First World War.

It arrived with tremendous intellectual force and genuine moral conviction. The old forms – representational painting, narrative storytelling, ornamental architecture, tonal music – were declared exhausted, dishonest and complicit in the catastrophes of that terrible conflict. The argument was not trivial: if the old values had failed to prevent a world war, then perhaps the old values were part of the problem. Perhaps sentiment was a lie. Perhaps the most honest response to the war was abstraction and pure function.

And so beauty was stripped out of public life with frightening speed. Quite literally, ‘the baby was slung out with the bathwater.’ Buildings that had stood for centuries were demolished and replaced with towers of glass and concrete. The classical tradition in painting was abandoned. In literature, storytelling was dismissed as naive. Difficulty became a virtue. Accessibility became suspect. The gap between art and audience widened into a chasm that for many, was uncrossable.

In education, the same impulse took hold. Imagination was subordinated to measurable outcomes. The arts were pushed to the margins. Making things with your hands was regarded as recreation rather than learning. The assumption, never quite stated but always present, was that these things were pleasant but were fundamentally shallow and without merit.

The modernist project asked valuable questions. But the cost was enormous. When you strip beauty out of life, people do not stop yearning for it. They go looking for it somewhere else. And where do they find it?

In the old stories. In Tolkien, who was writing against modernism as much as against industrialisation. In Lewis, who named the crisis more directly than anyone else. Millions of readers reached for Middle-earth and Narnia, not because they wanted to escape the modern world but because the modern world had stopped offering them anything worth staying for.

And then came JK Rowling.

For Harry Potter, she also reached back, but not to Beowulf or Norse saga, but to the Edwardian boarding school story, the chosen-one myth, the medieval castle, and to the men she admired the most: Tolkien and Lewis. Men of the Edwardian age. She built Hogwarts: a place lit by candles, furnished with oak and governed by tradition and eccentricity. A place where children learn by doing – mixing potions, tending magical creatures and casting spells. Hogwarts could not be more different from the fluorescent-lit, outcomes-measured, assessment-driven schools she was working in.

Harry Potter arrived in 1997, at the dawn of the internet age, and it conquered the world. Not because it was the most original story ever told – JK Rowling borrowed freely from everything that came before her, and she did so unashamedly, because it fed a hunger that had been building for decades. I would argue that hunger was very much in herself as it was in the wider world. The hunger for a world where things were made by hand, where knowledge was passed from person to person, where belonging was earned through loyalty and courage.

The adults who queue for Butterbeer at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (you can read more about that here), are doing exactly what the hundred thousand spectators at the Eglinton Tournament were doing in 1839. They were paying to stand in the presence of something they felt has been lost. The Victorian tournament was a shambles and Butterbeer is only a soft drink, but the desire, the yearning to be part of the romance is exactly the same.

Harry Potter is nearly thirty years old now. The children who read it under the covers by torchlight are now adults with children of their own. And they are handing their children the same books, reaching back to Hogwarts the way the Victorians reached back to King Arthur and Camelot. They do so because they feel that modern life, with all its digital convenience, has taken away something essential – romance.

The Victorians lost craft and beauty to the Industrial Revolution, and Morris and Burne-Jones reached back to King Arthur and the medieval world, and from that romantic inspiration, they made stained glass windows, paintings, and poetry, that many of us still treasure today.

Tolkien and Lewis tried to find themselves again after the trauma of the World Wars. They reached back to Beowulf, to Norse saga, to medieval romance, and from that inspiration they created Middle-earth and Narnia.

Modernism tried to strip beauty and narrative out of public life in the name of honesty and progress, but it simply created a hunger for things that are made with care and told with conviction, and that longing has simply grown stronger ever since.

The Harry Potter generation lost wonder and belonging to consumer culture and the start of the digital revolution. Rowling reached back to the boarding school, the castle, the candlelit hall for inspiration, and from that inspiration she made Hogwarts, a world so vivid and alive that millions of adults still queue to stand inside a replica of it, twenty-nine years after it was first imagined.

The names change. Camelot. Middle-earth. Narnia. Hogwarts. But the hunger, the yearning doesn’t. Every generation feels something essential slipping away and it always tends to be the same thing – beauty, craft, meaning, wonder and romance – and every generation produces storytellers who reach back to the older stories to recover it. I would argue that the looking to the past for inspiration is not nostalgic weakness, as some would have it, it is the driving force that comes into play when the present fails to nourish us with what our souls crave the most – hope.

And the lesson, every time, is the same. The storytellers who endure are the ones who look to the past and, inspired by what they find there, make something new. Morris made windows. Tolkien made languages. Lewis made a wardrobe that opened onto another world. Rowling made a school where children learn magic.

The hunger has not stopped, and it will never go away.

Here in the UK, The National Literacy Trust tells us that only one in three children aged eight to eighteen now enjoy reading in their free time – the lowest level in twenty years. The screens are bright, the friction is zero and the slop is endless. But when you put a real story in front of a child they lean forward. I have watched it happen as I delivered that story. Two hundred children in a school hall, and the room went quiet, and they leaned forward, because the story was real and they were hungry for it.

The question is not whether the old stories still matter. Of course they do. King Arthur still matters. Middle-earth still matters. Narnia and Hogwarts still matter. They will continue to have value, for as long as human beings need to be reminded of what the present keeps trying to take away from them.

The question is whether we trust ourselves to make new ones.

New stories, made with care and told with conviction. Handed to a child by an adult who genuinely believes in them – not because they were designed to add revenue to a corporate balance sheet, not because the story carries an approved message, not because it has a film deal attached, but because the story is good, stands on its own merit, and is founded on courage and hope.

Care & Craft – ‘Why we all need something real in a world dominated by digital.’

Written and read by Vincent Shaw.

In the nineteen-seventies, Friday night was always my bath night, and Friday nights in winter are the ones I remember the most.

December. Cold, wet and windy outside. Warm, dry and snug inside.

After my Friday night bath I was always allowed downstairs in a towel to get dry in front of the fire. Back then it was a coal fire. By early evening it had been going for hours, thumping out its orange furnace heat into the living room, and by that time it was the warmest room in the house. A child, naked and towelling dry in front of a real fire, no inhibitions, no self-consciousness, just warmth.

Then, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, clean, warm, hair brushed and in fresh pyjamas. Crumpets toasted on the open fire, butter, jam, tea, telly and delicious munching. And then the best bit.

Jackanory.

Jackanory was a BBC early evening children’s storytelling programme. Each week a well-known actor or personality would read a children’s book aloud, usually seated in an armchair, one chapter per episode across daily fifteen-minute slots. Its format was simple. One person in a very simple set and sometimes no set at all, just the storyteller and the chair. No special effects, no frantic editing, just old-fashioned storytelling.

The programme ran for thirty years, from 1965 to 1996, broadcasting around three and a half thousand episodes. Actors, comedians, even Prince Charles, as he was then, sat in that chair and read. But my strongest memory of Jackanory is of one episode in particular: it was December in the run-up to Christmas and the story was Alice Through the Looking Glass, told by Bernard Cribbins.

Actor Bernard Cribbins was Jackanory’s most well-known and best loved storyteller, appearing over a hundred times across twenty-five years. He was also Mr Perks in The Railway Children and the voice of the Wombles, but for me he will always be the first man, more than my own father, who told me stories.

The BBC’s original intention was to encourage children to read. The detractors at the time said it would do the opposite, that listening to a story would replace the effort of reading one. They were wrong. If anything, Jackanory lit the fire of wonder in children’s imaginations and sent them into books.

But something else was happening in that room, something older and deeper than literacy campaigns. Something that had been happening for thousands of years and long before anyone wrote anything.

Before there were books, before there were scrolls, and before there was any kind of written language, there was the spoken voice and oral storytelling.

We are very much a literate culture, but it takes very little imagination to understand what the world was like when nothing was written. When every story, every law and every warning about the dark forest only existed in the mind of the person who knew it, oral storytelling was of critical importance. It was the only way that tales and knowledge could be passed on.

Homer, for example, whoever he was, did not write the Iliad. He sang it. That great poem existed for centuries only as a handed-down performed story, shaped and reshaped by every performer across a thousand years.

Another example would be the great Welsh myths of the Mabinogion. They were told orally long before they were written down. Beowulf was a tale told around fires in ancient halls before it was ever set down on a page. The fairy tales we now read to children in neat illustrated editions were once told in kitchens by people who could not read, and did not need to.

The voice came first. The written word much later.

In 1987, Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, created another of my favourite TV shows. The Storyteller.

The Storyteller was filmed at Elstree Studios in the UK and aired on Channel 4 in 1988, and in the title role was actor John Hurt. Hurt sat by a fire, an old man in heavy makeup with enormous ears and a prosthetic nose, and he told European folk tales to his talking dog. The dog was sarcastic. The stories were dark. The production was visually sumptuous, but the engine of the whole thing, and the reason it worked, was John Hurt’s incredible voice simply telling a story.

Who could forget the show’s opening words:

‘When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place by the fire was kept for the Storyteller.’

Henson himself, in his notes on the series, wrote something that I think about often. He spoke of his childhood, of family gathered at his grandmother’s table, of stories told, of laughter. And then this: the flow of information, and energy, and entertainment from the storyteller to his listeners as the storyteller calls upon them to meet him halfway, to create the story in their own minds.

And now today, in 2026, stories delivered via the spoken word are becoming more and more popular. I am convinced that audio will eventually become the fiction delivery medium of choice.

Audiobooks are now the fastest-growing delivery format in publishing. In 2019 they overtook ebooks in revenue for the first time, and they continue to gain market share.

In the US, in 2024, audiobook sales reached over two billion dollars, up fifty percent in five years. Over half of American adults have now listened to an audiobook. The global market is projected to more than triple by the end of the decade.

People are listening on their phones while they walk the dog, on their commute, while they cook, while they fold the laundry. Modern living demands more of everyone’s time and audio is becoming more popular than ever before, as it allows everyone to ‘read’ even when occupied by other tasks, but it’s more than that. Everyone simply loves to be told a good story.

And children were there first, and the commercial reality proves it.

In 2016, two fathers in Germany launched the Toniebox: a small, soft, screenless cube. You place a figurine on top and it plays a story. No screen, no swiping, just a voice, speaking to a child who has chosen to listen. In its first three months it sold 30,000 units. By 2017 that had risen to 148,000 units. By 2019, a million. Today, over 10 million Tonieboxes have been sold worldwide, with more than one 134 million figurines. In Germany, one in every two preschool households now owns one. Over a million have been sold in the UK alone, and North America is now the company’s biggest market. Revenue grew over 30% in 2025.

My three-year-old grandson takes his everywhere.

And then, this month, April 2026, the New York Times published its first ever Children’s Audio Bestseller list, and the fact that fourteen of its top fifteen slots are Harry Potter tells you everything.

In April 2026, in an era of limitless streaming content and algorithmic recommendation and short-form video, the most successful children’s book series of the last thirty years is conquering the bestseller charts again. Not as books. Not as films. As voices.

The wheel has come all the way back round again.

What Jackanory and The Storyteller both understood, and what the Harry Potter audio chart proves beyond argument, is that the human voice telling a story is not an obsolete form of storytelling. It is not a quaint relic of a pre-literate age. It is something we still hunger for, and in my view, more now than ever.

There is a reason that the bedtime story endures. There is a reason that grandparents who cannot remember what they had for breakfast can still recite the opening of a story they were told at five years old. There is a reason that two hundred and twenty eleven-year-old children and five teachers leaned forward whilst I read them a story.

It’s because all of us, young and old, love stories and vocal storytelling came first. Nothing we have invented has ever replaced it, and now, in 2026, we are returning to it.

Care & Craft. Why we all need something real, in a world dominated by digital.

Beauty bound in a book.

A cathedral is impressive enough from the outside, simply by the sheer scale of it, but that is not what stirs most visitors, myself included. The full impact does not hit until you enter the building.

The air changes. It is cooler, stiller, and it carries a particular smell: old stone, candle wax, polish, and underpinning all this, is the feeling that you just walked into the presence of something far greater than yourself.

That sense of awe is not accidental. The people who commissioned these buildings knew exactly what they were doing. The soaring nave, the impossibly high vaulted ceiling, the way the light pours through the stained glass: all of it exists for a single purpose. This is God’s house, and it must be worthy of Him. Every arch, every carved capital, every pane of glass was created as an act of devotion: the best that human hands could offer, coming together collectively to create something magnificent.

I have always loved old churches. I love the cool, the musty quiet of a space that by its nature, pulls you into a gentle but insistent whispered respect.

But a cathedral takes that feeling of quiet respect and raises it into awe, and Winchester Cathedral does this in spades

However, it is not the magnificent building that draws me back to Winchester Cathedral time and again. It is the treasure it contains.

In the easternmost corner of the south transept is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful handmade objects ever created: the Winchester Bible.

You do not come to the Winchester Bible directly. There is an anteroom first, with a small permanent exhibition on how the Bible was made, from raw materials to working methods. In a display cabinet there are the raw pigments in both their whole state and powdered forms, some of which are toxic. Vermillion, a beautiful luminous red, made from ground mercury sulphide. Lead white, made from lead carbonate. Ultramarine blue, derived from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone whose only known source in the twelfth century was Afghanistan, and that was once more valuable than gold.

There is also a stretcher showing how calfskin was prepared by being soaked in lye, scraped, pulled taut, dried, and scraped again until it became vellum, a surface smooth enough to hold ink and strong enough to last a thousand years. The Winchester Bible required more than two hundred and fifty calf hides to create it.

In the centre of the room, there is a large digital display table. You can scroll through full-sized pages, tap on illuminations, zoom in to see brushwork and gilding and reveal the Bible’s beauty. This exhibition is well worth exploring before you see the Bible itself.

Directly next to the exhibition is the Bible room, and in here everything changes.

The room is not a room. It is the south-eastern corner of the south transept, and it is very dimly lit as in front of the original windows there is a curtain of very fine chain that filters out most of the daylight. In here there are three display cases, each holding one of the Bible’s rebound volumes, and each case is itself partly covered with heavy cloth.

The only illumination on the pages comes from two small LEDs in each case. They cast a warm glow not even as bright as a candle, to keep the light levels down to an absolute minimum.

By accident, or by design, the Bible room is the holy of holies - the inner sanctum.

The Winchester Bible was made in Winchester between roughly 1150 and 1175. It is the largest surviving English Bible from the twelfth century, and it contains the complete Latin Vulgate: Old and New Testaments, two versions of the Psalms, and the Apocrypha, and the entire text was written by one person.

Every word of the Latin Bible is written in a consistent, beautiful Gothic hand across hundreds of enormous pages, each one measuring nearly two feet tall. It is estimated that the text alone took over four years to complete, and as the scribe worked, another monk followed behind, checking and leaving corrections in the margins that are still visible today.

And then came the artists.

At least six of them working over a period of twenty-five years. None of them signed their work and we do not know their names. In the 1940s, an art historian named Walter Oakeshott studied the Bible systematically, and for the first time gave the artists names based on what he could see in their work: the Master of the Leaping Figures, the Master of the Apocrypha Drawings, the Master of the Genesis Initial, the Amalekite Master, the Master of the Morgan Leaf, the Master of the Gothic Majesty.

Those names alone tell you something. These were not journeymen following a template. Each had a distinct artistic personality. The Master of the Leaping Figures filled his illuminations with figures in dramatic, dynamic poses, bodies mid-leap, robes flying. The Master of the Genesis Initial, punched patterns into gilded surfaces and created figures turning their backs to the viewer: a striking innovation for the twelfth century. The Master of the Morgan Leaf worked in bold emotional expression and vivid blues and reds.

The process began with a drypoint drawing traced onto the vellum, then line inking, then gilding or silver accents applied by another hand. Finally the paint was added using a painting technique called tempera.

Tempera uses egg yolk instead of binder oils such as walnut or linseed. There is no working time as the paint dries instantly on application, and this constraint of the paint has very much influenced the overall style of not only the Winchester Bible, but illuminated manuscripts in general.

Those monks spent years of their lives on this work. They ground pigments that could poison them. They laid gold leaf over gesso and punched it with patterns for texture, and not one of them expected to be remembered for it. The work and the resulting beautiful bible was the point – not their names, but the Winchester Bible was never finished.

After twenty-five years the work stopped when its likely patron, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, died in 1171.

Because the artists stopped at different stages on different pages, you can see every step of the process. On some pages there are only rough outlines. On others, inked drawings waiting for colour. On others, gilding laid but not yet painted over. And on the completed illuminations, the full blaze of colour that was the intended destination of all that patient, painstaking, anonymous work.

The Bible is not only a beautiful object but its unfinished pages an invaluable document on the methods and techniques of illuminated manuscript creation. The Winchester Bible is one of the most beautiful examples of Care & Craft in existence, and I still find it extraordinary that the Bible still looks like it was completed only yesterday.

Six artists, one scribe, twenty-five years of work, and not one of them signed their names.

They did not need to. The Winchester Bible is still here. Still in the building it was made for. Still taking the breath away in a quiet corner of the south transept, nine hundred years after the last brush stroke was made.

In the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, there is an epitaph to its architect, Sir Christopher Wren. It is written in Latin and reads:

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

Reader, if you seek his memorial, look around you.

The monks who worked on the Winchester Bible have no epitaph. But if you ever find yourself in that dim corner of the south transept, leaning over a dimly lit case and looking at brushwork nine centuries old, you will understand why they do not need one.

In the opening minutes of The Prisoner of Azkaban film, Harry is under his bedcovers casting the spell Lumos Maxima. A ball of light magically appears at the tip of his wand, illuminating a copy of Extreme Incantations which he is studying. Uncle Vernon’s footsteps creak on the landing and instantly the wand light goes out, Harry lies down and feigns sleep. Uncle Vernon looks in, sees Harry asleep and leaves. Harry tries again.

In the book, there is no spell. Harry is using an ordinary Muggle torch to study for an essay on the History of Magic. The Lumos Maxima spell was invented by the film’s director Alfonso Cuarón, a cinematic liberty that Harry Potter fans have argued about for years.

But in both book and film, the premise is the same: to carry on doing something you cannot bear to stop, even at the risk of getting into trouble.

And this is what has always stayed with me about that scene. It has nothing to do with underage wizarding law, it has to do with the fact that I have been Harry under the bedsheets and I suspect, if you are reading this, that so have you. And in all likelihood so has every adult who ever loved reading as a child.

On more occasions than I can count, I would be tucked up in bed still reading when one of my parents would come upstairs and tell me to go to sleep as it was getting late. My response was always the same: ‘Let me just finish this page.’ And as soon as they were gone, I would forget entirely and carry on reading.

What felt like hours later, but was probably no more than ten minutes, one of my parents would be back. The light would go out followed by an exasperated ‘Go to sleep!’

Sleep. I didn’t need sleep. Heroes didn’t need sleep. They pressed on through the quest with very little food and no rest whatsoever. I had a princess to rescue, a lost treasure to find, a monster to kill. Sleep was for people who did not have the responsibilities of a hero. I was that hero.

Very quickly I adapted in the way all heroes have to. I learned to dutifully put the book down turn the light out when told. But I could never go to sleep. The quest was waiting.

As soon as the light under my bedroom door went out and the house fell quiet, out would come my torch. Deep under the duvet, breathing the warm stale air of my own little cave, I would open the book and dive back inside the story. The call to return was irresistible. It was not a choice I made, it was the complete conviction that the story needed me, the hero, to continue.

I have thought a lot about why that opening moment in the film - Harry, the covers, the light - has always stayed with me more vividly than the same scene in the book.

In the novel, Harry uses a torch. He is us. He is every child who has ever read past bedtime by torch light.

But in the film, Harry uses a spell. And whether the director intended it or not, the use of magic and light under the bed clothes reframes everything.

The light you read by in a duvet cave is not ordinary light. It is stolen light, conspiratorial light, a small secret act of defiance that transforms a cave into a kingdom.

What is it that makes a child unable to put a particular book down? They are not just reluctant to put the book down, they are unable to. They are willing to risk getting into trouble, willing to sacrifice sleep and to lie there waiting for the house to go quiet so they can reopen the book and be back inside the adventure.

Why is that?

I think the answer is simpler than we might expect and also very important.

A child lost in a book is not passively consuming entertainment. They are doing something active. They are building the world in their imagination, and living in the adventure.

A screen provides the faces, renders the castle, manufactures the weather. None of it requires your imagination to exist. You can look away and look back and it is all still there, exactly as it was, but behind that screen it is somehow less alive than it is in your head. When a book is closed, the world is gone, and it will not come back until you start reading again, recreating the world with your mind.

Watching is observing. Reading is inhabiting.

When that experience disappears from a childhood, when the torch never comes out in the duvet cave, something is lost that no amount of content on a screen can replace.

Late last year I was asked to present to forty eleven-year-old ‘reluctant readers’ at Midhurst Rother College in West Sussex. The school has around 1,200 students, drawn from villages and hamlets across four hundred square miles of countryside in and around the Sussex Downs.

For the session I workshopped ‘What is Story?’ During the hour we spent together, the children became deeply engaged. We talked about how everything is story from films to simply taking the bus to school or going shopping, and how, if they wanted to create their own stories, they had a secret weapon available to them at all times: the notebook.

I am currently writing a middle-grade fantasy novel, and towards the end of the session I read a short passage from it. I asked them what kinds of things they would like to read about in the book. Their engagement was extraordinary. At the end of the hour I was mobbed for autographs, which is a first for me; I’m unpublished and write purely for pleasure. The children were desperate to know more about a book that is not even finished and for me, that was quite something. I was asked on the spot by the teacher to return and present to the entire year group (Year 7 UK, Grade 6 USA) for World Book Day, on the fifth of March 2026.

I did so, this time to present and read to over two hundred and twenty eleven-year-olds and five teachers.

No pressure!

This time my presentation was ‘What is Magic?’

I talked about how what we call magic has changed over the centuries. Six hundred years ago, if you had said that one day people would fly, they would have called it witchcraft, and you might well have been burned for saying it. Today we fly all the time. We do not even look up when a plane passes overhead. What was once unimaginable became engineering, and what was once sorcery became science.

The same story has played out again and again. Lightning captured in glass tubes - a light bulb.. A device in your pocket that lets you speak to someone on the other side of the world - a mobile phone. A surgeon who can stop a heart, repair it, and start it beating again - medicine. Every one of these things would have been called magic by the people who came before us.

So I asked them: is there any magic left? Or has it all become science and there is no such thing as magic anymore?

And then I told them that I believe magic is real, and still very much alive.

Real magic is reading, because reading unlocks the magic of imagination.

Following this I read again from the novel I’m working on. This time for twenty minutes and there was some concern from teachers that it would be too long to keep the attention of two hundred eleven year olds.

The reading touched upon loss, danger, ancient mystery, responsibility and of course the type of magic that features in children’s fantasy.

It was extraordinary. Two hundred eleven-year-olds not only sat in silence for the full twenty minutes -they leaned in, and after the reading hands started to go up everywhere to ask questions, but unfortunately I was out of time.

I have thought about that morning many times since. Not because it was a triumph, but because of what it proved. The hunger for reading is there. The willingness to be transported, to be frightened - to believe. Those children were not reluctant or lost to screens and computer games. They were waiting for someone to hand them a story and to trust them with it.

I am not a teacher, I’ve never even tried to get published, but in my own small way, in a forgotten corner of England I am trying to do what I can to keep the magic of reading alive.

The UK National Year of Reading 2026.

Why Adults Queue for Butterbeer.
On imagination, reading and the magic we are in danger of losing.

There is a photograph of Peter Pan’s Playground in Worthing that I found some years ago, a faded colour postcard from the early 1970s. In it, children queue at a turnstile beside a small white castle with four towers, one at each corner. Pedal cars circle a track in the foreground. A helter-skelter rises behind. It is a perfectly ordinary seaside playground of its era, and to anyone else that is all it is: a postcard, a curiosity, a glimpse of a Britain that no longer exists.

But to me, it is a door back in time.

I must have been six or seven years old. My parents were early risers, the kind who arrived at destinations long before anything has opened, or in fact before the rest of the world has even had breakfast. We had driven down to the Sussex coast from London in the half-dark, and I had slept most of the way curled under a blanket in the back seat, waking with a start as we pulled into a large and empty car park. It was a cool, clear June morning, still early enough that the light still had a thin, sliver quality that spoke of the hot summer day to come.

And there, across the empty tarmac, was a castle. The castle. My castle.

That was what caught my eye. In a moment I was out of the car and running over to it, but the playground was still closed and wouldn’t open for another hour or two. There was no gate, just a ticket booth and a simple turnstile, hardly a barrier at all. A small child could easily have slipped beneath it, and that is exactly what I did.

Inside, the play ground was covered in thick white sand, and the first thing I did, as I always did, was kick off my sandals. I can still remember the cool, slightly damp sand between my toes. The castle was only made of wood and painted plaster, and the towers smelled faintly of pee from one too many child accidents, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t see wood and plaster; I saw something far grander, bigger, older. I had no interest in the rest of the playground; it fell away, replaced by a kingdom of my own. I was a knight, a wizard, and a king all at once, defending my stronghold from imaginary dragons, rescuing damsels imprisoned in towers, or casting spells and mixing potions. The faint scent of paint and timber became, in my mind, the warm, sun-baked smell of ancient stone - the smell of wee, the stinky potion in a cauldron, and for me it was all completely real.

Across the car park, I could see my parents beginning to move about, my mother making breakfast on the car bonnet - cornflakes and tea in a plastic thermos cup, that was too hot and always tasted of plastic. My father looking towards the castle, My castle.

I didn’t wave. I hid.

I had an overwhelming desire to stay hidden, not out of mischief but out of something more instinctive. I knew, with a certainty I couldn’t have articulated, that the moment they saw me the spell would break. That a kingdom requires, above all things, that no sensible adult is watching. Eventually my father’s eyes found me, and I dutifully returned to the car and to breakfast.

I went back to that castle every time we spent a day in Worthing. But it was never quite the same as that first illicit morning, alone in the early light, when the castle belonged to me and I was king.

What was the infant me, over fifty-five years ago now, actually experiencing in that castle? Was I just using my imagination? Just playing make-believe?

I want to stop at those words, because I think they matter more than we realise.

Take imagination first. We celebrate it - up to a point. It is on the curriculum, art, drama, creative writing, the school play. World Book Day. The children’s publishing industry, worth billions, is entirely predicated on imagination being valued. Nobody, in 2026, would openly argue that children shouldn’t have one.

But there is a particular kind of imagination that gets no timetable slot and earns no marks. The unstructured, solitary kind. The child alone in a castle at dawn, defending a kingdom that exists only in their head. An afternoon lost entirely in a world of their own making, doing nothing that could be measured or assessed or put in a report. That kind of imagination, the kind that requires only a cardboard box and permission, is the one that gets quietly squeezed out as the demands of measurable achievement accumulate. Imagination is all to often only celebrated in sanctioned forms and subordinated everywhere else.

Make-believe is worse. It is a compound word that contains its own diminishment - the make suggesting fabrication, the believe immediately qualified by the make that precedes it. We have built the scepticism into the language itself.

But the most damaging word of all, in this context, is just.

Just pretend. Just make-believe. Just playing. Just imagination.

That single word does enormous damage - and importantly, not to the child, but to the adult who says it. In using it, the adult simultaneously acknowledges and diminishes whatever the child is doing, as though their inner world is of lesser importance than whatever the practical world requires of them next. More damagingly still, in saying just, the adult is projecting their own disenchantment onto the child, assuming that growing up means growing out of imagination, because that, somewhere along the way, it is what happened to them.

What was happening in that castle was not a lesser version of engaging with reality. I was not just playing make- belive. For my six year old self, it was reality - processed through the most powerful and precious instrument a child possesses: an imagination running at full capacity, entirely unencumbered and doing precisely what it is meant to do.

The castle was wood and plaster, and it was ancient stone. Both of these things were simultaneously true. A child holds this contradiction without effort, without embarrassment, without any need to resolve it. The ordinary world doesn’t disappear, it gets promoted. Transformed into the substrate of something larger. The deckchairs didn’t cease to be deckchairs. They became guards who happened to look exactly like deckchairs.

This is not a failure to perceive reality accurately. It is a sophisticated act of creative perception, and it is one that not only more and more adults have lost, but that younger and younger children are steadily losing too.

But then if something is lost, it can also be found again.

Consider The Wizarding World in the Universal theme parks.

The Wizarding World lands have drawn around ten million visitors a year since opening in 2010, consistently the most visited areas in any of their parks. Interactive wands, priced at up to eighty-five dollars each, are among the highest-selling merchandise items in theme park history. The precise number sold over fifteen years is not publicly known, but even a conservative estimate - twenty per cent of visitors, across fifteen years - puts the figure somewhere between ten and fifteen million wands, and the revenue somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars from wands alone, before a single ticket, butterbeer, or broomstick is counted.

How did a corporate giant sell a billion dollars’ worth of plastic sticks?

I suspect the demand was never primarily driven by children. It was driven by adults who read those books at ten, twelve or fifteen, and discovered twenty years later that the hunger was still there. Still intact. Still looking for somewhere to go. The wands are not toys. They are a pass key - permission that allows the adult to revisit the child they once were, and to experience, briefly and at considerable expense, the magic they remember.

Disney understood this long before anyone else. The genius of their parks - the genuine genius, beyond the logistics and the economics - is that they are built to the precise specifications of adult longing. They are not designed for the children who are present. They are designed for the children those adults once were. Every detail calibrated to the moment when a story first became real. The castle at the end of Main Street is not a children’s attraction. It is an act of collective memory, and the adults weeping quietly as they walk toward it are not being sentimental, they are remembering something true and what they perceive, (probably subconsciously), as their own childhood selves.

The hunger for imagination doesn’t leave us. It simply gets lost, buried under the weight of ordinary life, waiting for permission to re-emerge.

Both Disney and Universal are extraordinarily clever at finding that buried longing, reawakening it, and charging admission to reach it. I don’t say this with cynicism, the experiences and joy is genuine, and I understand completely the adult queuing for butterbeer with an expression of barely suppressed joy. I am that adult. But there is something worth naming in the distance between what we needed then and what we are told we need now.

I was fortunate enough, at six years old, to have my own castle, at least for an hour, of wood, plaster, (and pee). At home, cardboard boxes and dining room tables and blankets thrown over chairs did the same job. The imagination was the thing, the props almost nothing.

Fast forward to today, and we are told the only way back is through licensed intellectual property, a twenty-minute queue, and an officially sanctioned butterbeer. Corporate appetite has monetised the longing, and — more worrying - convinced far too many people that their imagination can now only be accessed at the turnstile.

It was never true.

It still isn’t true, as somewhere right now, a child is proving it with a cardboard box and a blanket.

So what happened between that child in the castle and the adult in the queue?

The world got louder. Responsibility accumulated. The hundred practical things that constitute adult life crowded out the frequencies on which imagination thrives. We lost the habit of tuning in, but lost, not destroyed. That is the crucial and more importantly, hopeful distinction.

There is also, I think, a particular British cultural discomfort around being caught believing that makes this worse for us brits than for those in the USA. In the UK, the adult imagination is only tolerated in certain licensed contexts, fiction, film, games, the safely bounded space of a theme park. These are the approved channels, the places where believing is permitted.

We learn, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, that the deckchairs are just deckchairs. That seeing them as guards is charming in a six-year-old and alarming in a thirty-year-old. We become, in the truest sense of the word, disenchanted, not in a single dramatic moment but in a long, quiet erosion, the imaginative frequency still present, but now lost.

And yet I firmly believe there is a way back. There always has been. It runs, as it always has, through books.

Books remain enormously popular. They are delivered differently now, more often via screen, or as spoken word through earphones on a commute - and the industry has adapted accordingly. But the deeper habit of reading for pleasure, the private act of surrendering to a story for its own sake, is in trouble. Most alarmingly, it is in trouble among the young.

Here in the UK, The National Literacy Trust surveys over one hundred thousand children and young people every year. Their 2025 findings make for uncomfortable reading. Just one in three children aged eight to eighteen said they enjoyed reading in their free time, the lowest level recorded in twenty years. Fewer than one in five said they read anything daily, a figure that has fallen by nearly twenty percentage points since 2005. The steepest declines are among those aged eleven to sixteen - the precise ages at which a child’s relationship with reading tends to be formed for life.

A thirty-six per cent decrease in reading enjoyment since 2005 is a terrifying collapse.

Sit with that for a moment before moving on.

A child who does not read is a child whose imagination is being starved and replaced with unfulfilled longing, and who, in twenty years time, queue for the theme park because no one ever offered the cheaper, richer, more portable alternative, and who will need the billion-dollar infrastructure because the cardboard box was never offered.

The imagination doesn’t require a wand at eighty-five dollars. It requires a story, told well, given freely, at the right moment.

The reasons for collapse in reading numbers are not mysterious, and they are not the fault of children. Children, (as well has adults), have always chosen the path of least resistance when left to their own devices, this is not a moral failing, it simply evolution. The question is what we, as adults, have placed in their path.

And what we have put in their path, with increasing sophistication, is a screen.

I want to be careful here, because the screen debate has become so laden with guilt and counter-guilt that it is almost impossible to say anything useful. Screens are not the enemy. A child watching a beautifully made film, or playing a game that demands problem-solving, or listening to an audiobook in the car, is not the problem

The problem with screens, specifically in the context of reading and imagination, is not that they are harmful. It is that they are frictionless.

A book requires something of you before it gives anything back. You have to decode the words, construct the world, populate it with faces and voices that the author has only sketched. The effort is the point. That slight resistance, the gap between the words on the page and the world in your head - is precisely where the imagination does its work and becomes stronger. It is where the castle gets built.

A screen removes that gap. It hands you the faces, the voices, the world, pre-constructed and fully rendered. There is nothing wrong with receiving a story this way. But it is a different transaction. The imagination is a passenger rather than the engine, and like any faculty that goes unused, it quietly loses its tone.

The compound effect of a childhood spent almost entirely in the passenger seat is what the National Literacy Trust data is measuring. The child who reads, who has always read, who was given books early and often and enthusiastically - arrives at adolescence with an imagination that has been exercised daily, strong, supple, and capable of building kingdoms from almost nothing. The child who has not read arrives at the same point with the same innate capacity, but untrained, unexercised, less confident in its own existence.

And here is the cruelest part: the longer the gap, the harder the return. A child who has not learned to find pleasure in the friction of reading by the age of eleven or twelve is unlikely to discover it alone. The steepest declines in reading enjoyment, as the Trust’s data shows, fall precisely at the ages when phones become ubiquitous and social media becomes consuming, when the comparative effort of reading a book becomes, without support, simply too much to ask.

We have not made screens too appealing. We have made books for children far less appealing and in turn, too easy to put down.

The solution is not to remove the screens. It is to make the books impossible to resist, which means putting well written and imaginative books in the hands of adults who still believe in them. Adults who remember what it felt like when a story became somewhere you actually lived. Adults who have not entirely forgotten the cardboard castle.

There is something particular that happens when an adult who still has access to their own interior world of imagination sits down with a child and a book.

I don’t mean reading aloud, necessarily, though that is its own kind of gift. I mean credibility and conviction that an adult with their own rich and active imagination brings to a story. Children are extraordinarily sensitive where adults are concerned. They can detect, with an accuracy that should unsettle us, the difference between an adult who is performing enthusiasm and an adult who genuinely feels it. The performed version is kind, well-intentioned, and goes almost entirely unnoticed. The real version lands, it is infectious and stirs the child’s own imagination into action.

When an adult has not entirely forgotten what it felt like to be a child reading, that enthusiasm shines though, the child feels that the adult in the room is not merely facilitating access to a book. They are a fellow traveller. Someone who has been to these places and knows they are real.

This is not a skill you can acquire by reading about it, you have to recover what is lost in yourself by occasionally, slipping under the turnstile yourself and and playing in the wooden castle.

A child handed a book by an adult who is merely being dutiful will put it down the moment something easier appears. A child handed a book by an adult who genuinely believes, who leans in and says this one, with quiet certainty, will open it. And once a child is truly lost in a story, lost in the way that makes the words disappear and allows the world to inhabit their imagination, has something alight inside them that does not easily go out.

In the United Kingdom, 2026 has been named as the National Year of Reading.

It would be easy to let this pass as a governmental initiative, a well-intentioned campaign, a thing that teachers put on classroom walls. It is all of those things, but is also something quieter and more significant: an official acknowledgement, arriving in the careful language of policy, that something real is at stake. That the habit of reading, begun early and sustained through childhood, matters enough to be named publicly, to commit to, and to ask the whole country to think about.

What the initiative understands, and what is difficult to say in the language of policy but which Care & Craft exists precisely to say plainly, is this: a child who reads is a child whose imagination been released. Who will not, in later life, need a billion-dollar theme park to feel wonder, because wonder was given life and room to grow early, at low cost, through the simple and revolutionary act of a story well told.

The castle in Worthing is gone now. Peter Pan’s Playground closed long ago and the site is a now a swimming pool complex. The white towers with their four corners and their faint smell of paint, pee and adventure exist only in a postcard and in the memory of a sixty-something year old man who once slipped under a turnstile in the early morning and discovered that he was king, knight and wizard.

But that magic was never entirely lost.

For me, a happy and fulfilled life, came from the magic of my imagination and that was never lost to begin with, due to parents who loved books and who loved to read.

But that very first spark, that very first moment of permission to have and to treasure my imagination began in a tatty wooden castle that smelled of wee.

But I won’t.

Not because I don’t think the world is too dominated by digital. I firmly believe it is. My argument is that AI is not the enemy. Human greed is the enemy, it always has been.

And many people are already pushing back. I believe we are heading towards a quiet revolution and a resurgence of human-made art and craft, because historically, we have been here before. It all began with one of the biggest greenhouses ever built: the Crystal Palace.

In 1851, six million people walked through the doors of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. Six million people in a country of twenty-one million. Nearly a third of the population came to stare at what the Industrial Revolution had made possible. Steam engines. Power looms. Hydraulic presses. Mechanical reapers. Over a hundred thousand exhibits from forty-four countries filled a glass and iron cathedral that stretched the length of six football pitches. There were French silks and Sèvres porcelain. Indian textiles displayed on a stuffed elephant. Pianos, telescopes, firearms, furniture. A fountain made from four tons of pink glass. The Koh-i-Noor diamond. An early fax machine. Even the world’s first public flush toilets, which cost a penny to use, and gave us a phrase that can still be heard today. The Great Exhibition was industry’s coronation - and it was magnificent.

It was also, for a great many people, terrifying.

Because alongside the art and culture, there were the machines that had emptied cottage workshops, and put people out of work, and leading to widespread poverty. The handloom weavers suffered most. They had once produced cloth at their own pace, in their own homes, but they were being rapidly replaced by machinery that could do the same work faster, cheaper, and without complaint. The potter, the woodcarver, the glassblower and many other craftsman, all felt the ground shifting beneath their feet, and they too eyed the future of their livelihoods with fear.

Within a generation, the response came. Primarily from William Morris. He was not only a craftsman but a social revolutionary who sought to replace industrial capitalism with a society based on equal opportunity and artistic craftsmanship. Along with artists such as Walter Crane and Edward Burne-Jones, he founded the Arts and Crafts movement and declared that industry itself was not the problem. He famously clarified his position by saying:

“It is not this or that tangible steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us.”

Commercial tyranny. I would argue that the basis of his objection can be summarised in a single word: greed.

Morris did not hate industry. He objected to machines being used to dictate to human beings, turning workers into machine minders. He viewed machines as valid tools to assist workers and eliminate what he called ‘donkey work,’ the tedious manual labour that consumed lives without enriching them.

The Arts & Crafts movement grew out of a simple conviction: that the Industrial Revolution, for all it had given us, was taking something essential away. The factories were producing more than ever before, faster and cheaper than anyone had thought possible. But the things they produced had no soul in them. No fingerprint. No evidence that a human being had sat down and cared about what they were making. Morris and his contemporaries looked at what was pouring out of the mills and the foundries and said: this is not enough. We can make things that are beautiful, and the making of them with our own hands and imaginations matters as much as the result of that effort.

I believe William Morris’s view towards AI today would be exactly the same as it was towards industry in his time. Machines exploited by the greedy to increase profit, not to make life easier for the people doing the work.

In an ideal society, machines would be used to reduce labour and increase leisure time. Time to think, to read, to make something beautiful with your own hands.

And in the end, that same Industrial Revolution that destroyed the livelihood of the handloom weaver has also given us an extraordinary number of benefits. Clean water. Abundant energy. Modern medicine. And in my view, one of the most liberating machines ever invented: the washing machine. It returned hours to the lives of millions of women who, until its invention, had spent entire days bent over washtubs.

Industry, at its best, has always done that. It can take away the drudgery and free human hands and imaginations.

And so here we are again. A new machine has arrived, artificial intelligence, and it is extraordinarily powerful. And once again, people are understandably afraid. And once again, greed has seized the tool before most of us have had time to think.

You can see it everywhere you look. Websites filled with soulless text that reads like a Wiki entry.

Children’s books with illustrations that have the eerie, waxy perfection of a mannequin’s smile. Articles that say nothing in a thousand words, all of them competent, none of them alive. Content - and there’s a word that should make us uneasy - generated not because someone had something to say, but because a space needed filling and a machine could fill it faster and cheaper than a person.

I have come to think of AI generated content as the great ‘almost’ flood.

Almost writing. Almost art. Almost human. Close enough to pass a glance, but dead the moment you hold it up to the light.

The fault is not with AI, it is with the person who commissioned it. They didn’t want something good. They wanted something quick. They didn’t want craft. They wanted content. They didn’t want to put in the effort, they wanted to go straight to the product and profit. And so we come back to it yet again.

Greed, human greed.

That is not a technology created problem. It is not the fault of AI. AI is just a tool, like any other. It is a person created problem - human greed and laziness.

But something positive is happening too.

Many of us are pushing back against the ‘almost.’ There is a growing movement that is steadily gaining momentum, as people look beyond the AI fakery, determined to find something real. You can see it in the rise of craft markets and maker spaces. In the parents who are getting children to put down their tablets and pick up their paintbrushes. In the queues outside independent bookshops. In the young people who are choosing vinyl records, film cameras, handwritten letters, and notebooks over their digital equivalents. Not because they are Luddites, but because they are hungry for something that has texture and weight and the unmistakable mark of being made by human imagination and hands.

And crucial to this desire to once again own real media such as vinyl and DVD, is that people are pushing back against corporate greed. People want to own what they purchase. You own the vinyl, you own the Blu-ray. You don’t own streaming services, the provider does. You simply rent it, and you are also held hostage to their terms and conditions. And so I make no apology for coming back to it yet again.

Greed, human driven corporate greed.

And with no apology for repeating myself and coming back to my argument. The enemy is not AI.

Why is AI not the enemy?

Because quietly, away from the greed, slop and the outrage, that same AI powers some incredible technology that is of real benefit.

AI is helping researchers untangle protein structures that hold the keys to diseases we have fought for generations.

AI is helping doctors identify cancers that human eyes would miss, and is reading medical scans with a precision that saves lives.

AI is translating languages in real time, connecting people who could never have spoken to one another.

AI is doing what industry does at its best — taking the drudgery, the impossible volume, the tasks too vast for human hands alone, and freeing us to do what only we can do - create beautiful things.

The tool is not the problem, the problem is ourselves and our human nature.

We choose to generate rather than create. We choose to consume rather than make. We choose to let our children scroll rather than draw, watch rather than read, absorb rather than imagine. That is not the machine’s fault. The machine didn’t make that choice. We did.

The world is becoming more greedy and more lazy. That is the inevitable consequence of human nature. All we can do, those of us that passionately believe in Care & Craft, is push back against it and continue to strive in our chosen analogue pursuits. It’s time to stop blaming AI and take responsibility for our own actions.

Care & Craft – Why we all need something real in a world dominated by digital.

I first read The Lord of the Rings when I was at art college and played my first D&D game. I have also listened to the Rob Inglis audiobook many times and either read or listen to it every couple of years or so. But it was only recently that I noticed how nearly everybody in Middle-earth is making something.

Not just the obvious things, the Rings of Power, the great swords with their ancient names. I mean everybody. Hobbits are gardeners, bakers, brewers, weavers, and woodworkers. Elves are jewellers, smiths, weavers, and poets. Dwarves are miners and masons and the finest metalworkers in the world. Even the Ents, those slow, ancient tree-shepherds, are makers of a kind, tending, shaping, nurturing living things across centuries of patient care.

Middle-earth is not a world of heroic warriors. It is a world of craftsmen who have to put down their tools because they have to fight.

Care and craft is front and centre of Tolkien’s creation myth from the very beginning. The Ainulindalë, the Music of the Ainur, is an act of making. The world is not spoken into existence by decree. It is crafted, first as music and then shaped physically by the hands of the Valar, the angelic powers who enter the world they helped compose and begin to build it.

And among the Valar there is Aulë, the Smith, the craftsman. His joy and his curse is that he cannot stop creating. He loves materials and form so much that, unable to wait for the arrival of Elves and Men, the children of Ilúvatar, he goes ahead and makes the Dwarves. An entire race, brought into being not out of malice or ambition but because the urge to create something was simply too strong for him to resist.

In a mythology full of grand themes and the struggle of light against darkness, Tolkien places the creative impulse at the very root of existence. Making things is not something that happens in his world. It is what his world is.

Follow the thread forward into the great stories of the First Age and you find the Silmarils, the three jewels of unsurpassed beauty, made by the Elf-smith Fëanor, capturing the light of the Two Trees of Valinor. The entire tragedy of The Silmarillion unfolds because of what one craftsman made. Wars are fought, oaths are sworn, civilisations fall, all over three handmade objects and the question of who has the right to possess them.

The Rings of Power are forged. Not conjured magically into existence, forged. They are made by hand. The language Tolkien uses is always the language of the workshop: hammering, tempering, making. Sauron seduces the Elven-smiths of Eregion not with promises of conquest but by appealing to their love of craft. He comes to them as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, and offers to teach them to make more beautiful things. He corrupts them through the very quality that makes them noble.

I believe anyone who has been given the desire to create has been gifted something sacred, but that gift is also vulnerable. It can be turned and corrupted, which happens all too often in the real world. Nuclear generated energy on the one hand, weapons of mass destruction on the other.

However, for me, it is in the quieter corners of Middle-earth that the craftsmanship becomes most appealing.

Bilbo’s home, Bag End, is described with the loving precision of someone who cares about how things are made. The round green door with its brass knob in the exact middle. The panelled walls, the tiled floors, the polished chairs. For Hobbits, and for many of us in the real world, family, home and handicraft are all one and the same thing.

The hobbits knit, sew, and cook. They brew beer. They tend gardens with a devotion that borders on faith, and in Sam Gamgee’s case it really does become a matter of faith. Faith and belief that his gift from Galadriel in Lothlórien, the box of earth and a single mallorn seed, will heal the Shire. And and after all the hurts of Saruman it does exactly that.

For me, the best example of craft and faith in Lord of the Rings is the Elvish rope given to Sam in Lothlórien and that he uses on the journey to Mordor. Craft, because it is hand woven by Galadriel and her maids. Faith because it responds to the those in need. When it is used, it holds. When its work is done, it releases. It is a thing made with care and craft, and it has something close to a soul. Sam, the gardener and practical craftsman, is the one who understands it best. When they reach the bottom of the cliff and the rope is still tied at the top, Sam tugs it and it unties itself, falling into his hands. “Have it your own way, Mr. Frodo,” he says, “but I think the rope came off itself, when I called.” - an act of faith.

Sam is not the only one who sees the world through a maker’s eyes. Gimli in the Glittering Caves of Helm’s Deep is one of the most beautiful moments in the entire book, and it is entirely about craft. He does not see treasure. He does not see wealth to be hoarded. He sees potential, raw stone waiting to be shaped, caverns that could be carved and lit and made into something that does justice to their natural beauty. He would work the stone, he tells Legolas, with such care that the caves themselves would not object. That is a craftsman talking.

And his request to Galadriel for a gift, three hairs from her golden head is that of a craftsman.

“It is said that the skill of the Dwarves is in their hands rather than in their tongues,’ she said; ‘yet that is not true of Gimli. For none have ever made to me a request so bold and yet so courteous. And how shall I refuse, since I commanded him to speak? But tell me, what would you do with such a gift?’

‘Treasure it, Lady,’ he answered, ‘in memory of your words to me at our first meeting. And if ever I return to the smithies of my home, it shall be set in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of my house, and a pledge of good will between the Mountain and the Wood until the end of days.”

Then there is lembas. Elven waybread. The bread sustains not just the body but the spirit. Tolkien is very clear about this. Lembas is not merely efficient nutrition. It is food made with such care and intention that eating it is restorative in a way that goes beyond the physical. It feeds the will. In many ways it could be interpretted as a kind of eucharist. It is the opposite of the Orcs’ maggoty bread, which sustains the body and degrades everything else.

Consider, too, the swords. Sting, Glamdring, Orcrist, ancient blades made by Elvish smiths in Gondolin, a city that fell thousands of years before Bilbo found them in a troll’s cave. They still glow when enemies are near. They still cut when lesser blades would fail. The craft endures long after the craftsman is gone. Tolkien returns to this idea again and again: craftsmanship outlasts the craftsman.

And the reforging of Narsil into Andúril, the sword that was broken, remade for a new age, is not incidental to the plot. It is the moment Aragorn’s kingship becomes real. Not when he sits on a throne. When a sword is reforged. The making of the thing is the making of the king.

What strikes me most is that Tolkien draws a clear moral line between good making and bad making. The Elves craft slowly, with love, over centuries. Sauron forges in secret, in haste, with domination as his purpose. Saruman tears down the trees around Isengard and burns them in his pits and furnaces. His is the work of industrialisation, of making without care - the corruption of ingenuity and craftsmanship.

And when Saruman comes to the Shire, that final, devastating chapter that so many readers find uncomfortable, what does he do? He replaces the handmade with the mass-produced. He knocks down the old buildings and puts up ugly new ones. He pollutes the water. He turns the mill into a factory. He does not invade the Shire with an army, Saruman destroys the Shire with industy By the replacement of things made with care by things made by machine. For Tolkien, that is the deepest violation of all.

I do not think this is suprising, Tolkien was a careful maker himself. A philologist who built languages by hand and then built a world to house them, who illustrated his own books, who drew maps not as afterthoughts but as working tools, who revised his manuscripts with the obsessive patience of a man who understood that good work, that craftsmanship, takes time.

Tolkien was, in every meaningful sense, a craftsman, whose tools happened to be pen and paper. Beneath the mythology, he made a world in which care, craft and faith is the purest expression of what it means to be human.

I first visited the place in the 1980s, whilst still in my twenties, and I was introduced to it by one of my oldest friends. In those days nobody really knew about the place. To reach it, you left the A3, turned off down a lane and almost immediately you came to Watts Chapel. Another two minutes along the lane was the Watts Gallery. Back then the gallery was in serious danger from lack of money for essential maintenance, and there was a real sense that the whole thing might simply be lost.

My friend, his mother and I had a private tour of the gallery with the then curator and G.F.Watts expert, Richard Jeffries. As we were the only visitors that day, and quite possibly that week, we had the place to ourselves. George Frederic Watts was one of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian age - known in his lifetime as ‘England’s Michelangelo.’ His work hangs in Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery. He painted Tennyson, Gladstone, Carlyle. But not only was he an accomplished painter, he was also a sculptor. But like so many of the great Victorian artists, he had fallen out of favour, and his gallery, tucked away in a Surrey lane, had been forgotten and was quietly falling apart.

But on that very first visit, it was the memorial chapel that stayed with me. I remember standing in the chapel and being completely overwhelmed. Every surface was alive, dense with colour. Deep reds, muted golds, blue-greens, gesso angels and Celtic strapwork and swirling tendrils of the Tree of Life. Angels of light facing outward. Angels of darkness facing the wall. Cherubs crowding the ribs of the vaulted ceiling. It was intense, enveloping, and completely unlike anything else I had ever seen, and was love at first sight. I walked out into the Surrey afternoon a different person, and although I did not know it then, that afternoon was the beginning of a lifelong interest for the Arts and Crafts movement, and (as readers of my first post will know, a connection that would turn out to run far deeper than I ever imagined).

Whilst in the chapel I learned that my friend’s mother’s aunt had been a close friend of Mary Watts, George’s wife, and had helped build and she had helped her decorate the chapel.

At the time I did not know who Mary Watts was, and today most people still don’t. She was, and largely remains, a footnote in her husband’s story. Even her own writing is self-effacing. We know more about George’s life from her pen than we do about hers.

But it is Mary who built Watts Chapel.

Born in India in 1849, the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat, Mary Fraser-Tytler grew up by the banks of Loch Ness, raised by her grandparents after her mother died when she was barely two years old. She drew and painted from childhood, and her family encouraged it.

Mary was naturally gifted. She studied art in Dresden, and then had formal training at the Slade School of Fine Art, one of the very first women to do so. She trained in sculpture under the celebrated Aimé-Jules Dalou and was exhibiting her work long before she met the man whose name would come to overshadow hers.

She married George Frederic Watts in 1886. She was thirty-six, he was sixty-nine. It sounds improbable, but by all accounts it was a genuine loving marriage, and they had a singular vision - an unshakeable belief that art existed not for galleries and collectors alone, but for everyone. ‘Art for all’ was their phrase, and it was not a slogan. It was a way of living.

In 1889, George and Mary came to stay with friends in Compton, a quiet village tucked into the Surrey hills just south of Guildford. They were looking for somewhere to escape London’s winters, its pollution, poor light and interruptions. George’s fame attracted a constant stream of visitors, and the couple craved time to simply work.

They fell in love with the area straight away, and by 1891 they had built a studio-home. Designed in the Arts and Crafts style by Sir Ernest George. They called it Limnerslease, from ‘limner,’ meaning artist, and ‘leasen,’ an old word for gleaning.

What had begun as a winter retreat quietly became their real home. As the years passed, Limnerslease took precedence over their London residence. Free from the interruptions of London society, the couple were able to work uninterrupted while becoming a celebrated part of the Compton community. George painted some of his most ambitious Symbolist works in his new studio, designed with his vast canvases and his need for good light in mind. But it was Compton village that became the centre of their lives.

The house became Mary’s canvas. She decorated the walls and ceilings in plaster and gesso reliefs. For her terracotta work she dug clay from the grounds. In September 1894, she wrote in her diary: ‘My hope is that terracotta shall be my future.’ She soon discovered, however, that the local rural community was in serious decline and this troubled both herself and Geroge deeply. However the Parish Council were seeking land for a new cemetery and Mary offered to build a mortuary chapel on the proposed site. Her offer was accepted. George financed the project whilst Mary designed and managed it.

On Thursday evenings, the drawing room at Limnerslease became a studio, and Mary set up free clay modelling classes, for anyone who wanted to come. The lessons focussed on making terracotta tiles, and these were used to decorate the exterior of the chapel.

Over seventy villagers, including children, made everything- from the chapel door hinges to small flower decorations on the inside. The chapel was consecrated in 1898, with the interior decoration continuing until 1904. Virtually every resident of the village had a hand in it.

Pause on that for a moment, because what Mary Watts did was not only admirable - it was radical.

Mary did not simplify her vision to accommodate untrained hands. She trained the hands to meet the vision. Mary believed, and proved, that ordinary people, given patient instruction and genuine interest, could make something extraordinary. As she once put it: ‘Giving money is one thing, but giving ourselves is the one great and necessary gift.’

Mary gave herself - her time, her patience and her knowledge.

My friend’s mother’s aunt was one of those seventy villagers. She stood in that drawing room. She put her hands in that clay. And decades later, I stood inside the thing she helped create not knowing any of this, just knowing that something about the place had stopped me in my tracks.

But here is the part of the story that moves me most. When the chapel was finished, the villagers did not want to stop making.

They asked Mary to keep teaching them. The Thursday evening classes had changed something in them. It had not just taught them a new skill, but fulfilled a creative need that I believe is deep inside all of us. The simple pleasure of making something with your hands, of shaping raw material into something beautiful.

Mary gave the villlagers clay and villagers discovered themselves. That is what handicraft does.

Those Thursday evening classes became the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild. What started as a community project to decorate a chapel became a working pottery - producing terracotta garden ornaments, sundials, vases, bookends, and decorative pieces, and it helped revive the community. A kiln designed by William De Morgan was set up in the grounds of Limnerslease. By 1901 Mary had recruited a full-time pottery manager and a new premises was built across the road. She designed ranges for Liberty’s department store, and Liberty named her as their designer, against their usual policy of only selling under their own brand. The Guild won medals at horticultural shows, and the pottery ran for over fifty years, long after both George and Mary had died.

There is also a detail I keep returning to. Mary’s earliest teaching was not in Compton but in Whitechapel, London. In the 1880s, years before her marriage, Marry taught clay modelling to boys at a club in the East End - shoeblacks and street children with nothing. She later described the purpose simply: to give them ‘the pleasure of making something in their leisure time.’

Not to train them. Not to improve them. Not to fix them. Just to teach them the pleasure of handicraft and making something with their hands.

I think about that a great deal. The pleasure of making something. It is so plain, so unassuming, and it is what Care and Craft is about.

What Mary Watts understood, and what we are danger of losing, is that the act of making is sometimes more than just a hobby - it is often a human need.

Mary did not preach this. She simply opened a door, set out the clay, and let people discover it for themselves.

George Frederic Watts died in 1904. He did see the chapel completed however and painted The All-Pervading for its altar just three months before he died.

With George’s death, Mary made Limnerslease her permanent home. She managed the pottery and continued to run the gallery she had built to house George’s work. She wrote The Annals - the biography she published on the life and thoughts of her dear husband. She championed women’s suffrage, becoming President of the Godalming branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. And she continued, always, to make.

She watched the chapel settle into its landscape. ‘It is growing every day less red,’ she wrote, ‘and the green enfolds it all so beautifully now, the trees are in leaf. A sweet resting place.’

Mary Watts died at Limnerslease in 1938. She and George are buried together in the cemetery, a few yards from the chapel she built with the people of Compton. Some of the craftspeople who helped make that chapel are buried there too, their graves marked with terracotta headstones made by the Guild, and around sixty of the stones still stand in the cemetery today.

The place I walked into in the 1980s, half forgotten and gently falling apart, is not the place you will find today. Watts Gallery and Artists’ Village has been restored, reimagined, and brought back to life. But what strikes me most is not the restoration, it is that Mary’s legacy has not only been preserved, it is still very much alive.

Today, Watts Gallery and Artist’s Village is still a place of making and handicraft. There are pottery workshops and clay courses. There are family days where children put their hands in the same local clay that Mary and the villagers did over a century ago. There is an artist-in-residence programme. There is a community learning programme they call ‘Art for All’ - the very phrase both Mary and George lived by. Mary Watts did not just build a beautiful memorial chapel, she built a community of craftsmen.

If there is a place that embodies everything Care & Craft is about and everything I personally believe in, it is Watts Memorial Chapel - a story of clay and community.

Care & Craft ‘Why we all need something real in a world dominated by digital.’

Watts Gallery — Artists’ Village is in Compton, near Guildford, Surrey, England. The gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday. Watts Cemetery Chapel is open daily and free to visit.

The smell of reading is pink paraffin.
My father collected antique Victorian oil lamps. Not a huge number, five or six, and for most of my early childhood they sat unlit on shelves and windowsills, doing nothing in particular but gather dust.

One lamp I remember well. It had a big heavy base, a tall brass decorative column, on top of which was the oil reservoir or font - glass and etched with flowers. Crowning this was the rest of the lamp and the glass chimney. I remember it well because in the UK, during the 1970s, there were winter power cuts, and I learned to read by the light of that lamp.

About ten minutes before the power was due to go off, my father would carefully check and trim all the wicks and fill the fonts with paraffin - pink paraffin, the colour of rosé wine, and I remember it colouring the etched glass flowers of the font. But what I remember most was the smell, and even though I haven’t smelled pink paraffin for over forty years, I would recognise it again in a moment. It was an odd, chemical but at the same time sweet smell, like a cross between petrol and barley sugar, and when the lamps were lit that smell filled the whole room, not overpowering, but there as an ever present, distinctive and quite comforting smell.

The smell changed when the lights came back on and the lamps went cold. The top of the glass chimney had a fine coating of dense black soot on the inside, and the soot had its own acrid scent that was nothing like the warm sweetness of the burning oil. Even now, more than fifty years later, I could tell you the difference between those two smells with my eyes closed.

It turns out there is a reason why these kinds of memories stay with us. Of all our senses, smell is the only one with a direct line to the parts of the brain that handle memory and emotion. Everything else - what we see, what we hear, touch, and taste - gets processed and filtered before it reaches the brain. Smell bypasses that filtering and arrives unedited, and carrying the raw memory with it. Scientists call this the Proust effect, after the famous passage in which the smell of a madeleine dipped in tea sends the narrator tumbling back through decades of memory. Proust got it exactly right, even if he did take several thousand words to describe what most of us experience in the space of a heartbeat.

The smell arrives first. The memory follows. And the emotion that comes with it is complete and unfaded, as though no time has passed at all.

I think that childhood memory is often built on smells that no longer exist.

Before my dad’s paraffin lamps, I remember coal being delivered by a horse and cart. The coalman heaving sacks down from the cart and pouring them through a small hole in the pavement and into the coal bunker below. The noise of it, that rush and clatter, the dust, but mostly the smell. Coal has a smell like nothing else - dense, mineral, sulphurous and ancient. I got into trouble more than once for playing in the coal bunker. It was the smell that drew me in there, not the dirt.

When I was old enough, I was allowed to light the fire. First on the cold grate, newspaper, loosely bundled and newspaper has a smell not unlike pink paraffin. On top of paper, you place dry kindling, and then on top of this, coal.

I loved lighting the fire. It wasn’t that I had a fascination with flame. It was more that it was such a transformative act, and there was an art, a craft to making up the fire. If you didn’t get it just right then the newspaper would go up in flames too fast, going out without catching the kindling. Then you would have to take the fire apart and start again.

And there were stages of smell. The burning newspaper. The resinous bubble of the kindling. And then the coal itself, slow at first, reluctant, before it finally took, smoky and sulphurous. After an hour, when the coal had settled onto its glowing orange ember bed, the whole room filled with that deep, earthy warmth that central heating has never come close to replicating. I remember our chimney sweep too, how the smell of soot was so deeply ingrained in him that it preceded him into a room like an announcement.

These are not nostalgic observations from a man who wishes it was still 1973. Central heating is far better than a coal fire in almost every practical respect, and I do not miss carrying a bucket of ash out to the garden on freezing mornings. But in not having the coal fire, we don’t have the smell of something real happening in the middle of the house.

Everything has a smell an primary school is another distinctive one for me. The particular tang of powder paint mixed too thick in a plastic pot. Coal tar soap in the toilets, that sharp medicinal scent that I can still summon instantly. And whilst not a smell, it is a distinct memory: drinking ice cold milk from a small glass bottle, so cold it gave you brain freeze and smelled of nothing but cold itself.

Every one of those smells is an anchor. Pull on any one of them and a whole memory comes with it, complete and immediate, and more real than any photograph.

For me, this matters because we are increasingly living in a world that has no smell at all. A screen has no scent. A digital photograph carries no trace of the darkroom. An email does not arrive with the faint whiff of the sender’s desk. We are conducting more and more of our lives through a medium that is, from a sensory perspective, completely sterile. Clean, efficient, frictionless, and empty.

I am not saying this to wag a finger at anyone’s screen time. I am typing this on a computer, after all. But I do think it is worth noticing that it is what we lose when our lives become too digital. Not just the pleasure of physical creation, but the smell that goes with it. And without the smell, we lose the anchor that memories often latch onto.

When we are doing something creative - when we bake, paint, carve, read or write - the smell of what we are doing makes a connection so direct it can quite literally transport us back through time.

Around two years ago, a very elderly aunt said to me: ‘Your grandmother was given a gold sovereign by the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Morris.’

I burst into tears on the spot.

Now on the surface of it, this might sound like an odd reaction for a sixty-something-year-old man, and I must admit that those tears took me completely by surprise. But I think my tears are at the very heart of why Care and Craft is so very important to not only me, but to so many other people.

To explain, I’ll start with a bit of backstory.

I have always had a deep love for anything King Arthur and especially for the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. We both have a deep love for King Arthur, and I believe that my initial interest in King Arthur goes back to my childhood, to Disney Time and to one Disney film in particular, ‘The Sword in the Stone.’

I also have one other very strong memory from this time and that is one of jealousy. I was very jealous of my best friend who went off on holiday to California and Disneyland. This was around 1970 when I was seven years old.

The Sword in the Stone and the Disneyland castle were those first seeds that sparked my lifelong interest in King Arthur and the legends of the Round Table.

Fast forward through the next fifty years.

At school I was only ever any good at writing and drawing. Other than that I was an academic dead end.

School led to art college which led to a career in design.

Professionally I worked on art and design all day long, but I kept up the writing in my free time; diaries, notes, short stories and an attempt at a novel or two.

Meanwhile, every so often, fragments of the family story would emerge: ‘Of course you get your artistic temperament from great-grandfather Ted. He used to make stained glass windows, you know.’ And that was about as far as the conversation ever went.

Then came the gold sovereign bombshell from my aunt and the tears. On the back of this, she asked me to find out more. ‘Vincent dear, you use computers. Have a look into it would you. From what I can gather you can trace relatives on the computer now.’

So I looked into it.

Great-grandfather Ted was my my grandmother’s father on my mother’s side. As I dug deeper into the story, I discovered that my grandmother did indeed get given a gold sovereign, but unfortunately not from William Morris. He died in 1896, four years before she was born.

The gold sovereign had come from her grandfather Robert, and he had owned and run a stained glass company in Marylebone, London.

My great-great-grandfather Robert was a stained glass window artist and he undertook work for Morris and Company, but more than that, his sisters lived above the very first Morris & Company shop at 449 Oxford Street. These are my great-great-aunts and they both also worked for Morris and Co as cloth stainers. Both he and William Morris were born in the same year, 1834, and Robert knew William Morris well.

This is the William Morris connection.

So why, did the gold sovereign story move me to tears?

One word: connection.

I didn’t know it, but subconsciously I was desperate to be connected to those Victorian artists and craftsmen, and their very romantic take on the legends of King Arthur.

I believe that whatever we create, be it a painting, something written, knitted, constructed or composed, no matter what it is, that act of creation allows us to express what it is to be human in a way that nothing else can.

That is why this Substack exists.

Postscript.

What of my great-great-grandfather Robert and his stained glass windows?

My family has no historical connection with this part of the country, Sussex, other than moving to the area in the late 1960s. I have spent most of my life here and never given the area much thought, other than how much I love the place, not least because I have my very own castle just around the corner; Arundel Castle. Actually it belongs to the Duke of Norfolk, but I think of it as mine just the same.

I moved to my present house and village around ten years ago, again no connection to the area, my family on both sides are all Londoners.

When I got asked by my aunt to try and find out more about my relatives and stained glass, the only evidence I could find (and it is well documented across multiple sources) is that there is only one existing example of great-great-grandfather Robert’s windows left.

Those windows are in a small parish church. And then came the second bombshell. That church is a short walk around the corner from my house, a church whose existence I was unaware of until I researched my family history.

No one in my family knew the windows were there. No one knew they had survived at all and I had been living not ten minutes away from them for the last ten years, completely unaware of their existence.

Care and Craft sometimes calls to us in ways that we cannot begin to imagine.