About me, Michael.
Maker of carved heritage maps in Brierley Hill, in the Black Country.
I find talking about myself uncomfortable. But I did need to step out of my workshop in Brierley Hill, my happy place, to show you a little of the person behind Little Orchard Workshop.
A long time ago I attended Bournville College of Art and then took a degree in Industrial Design Engineering. A recession meant I never got to use it. Until recently I was a heavy goods driver for a steel haulage firm here in the Black Country. Then I reached a point where doing the thing I wanted to do mattered more than a stable job.
Carved heritage maps, made the honest way.
What I make now are carved heritage maps. Each one is worked into solid beech from genuine historical records, Ordnance Survey surveys and old town plans, then precision-carved in my workshop in the West Midlands. People sometimes ask whether the maps are hand-carved. They are not, and I'm open about that. The machine cuts the wood. The craft is in the curation, adapting the original cartographer's work feature by feature and word by word into something durable, something you can touch.
I have a problematic obsession with accuracy.
But it serves a real purpose. My carvings need to be accurate enough for you to see the original marks of the man who first drew the map. I want you to see his hand in my work and the respect I have for those craftsmen.
Art, design and technology, made solid.
I have artistic training, design skills and a love of technology, and an odd sort of perception that sees the connections between these disciplines. The maps are those connections made solid. I see the artistic merit in certain areas of a map. Customers choose places with personal meaning. Corporate clients see a way to express the history and legacy of their company.
- Trained
- Bournville College of Art · Teesside University Industrial Design (Engineering)
- Workshop
- Brierley Hill, the Black Country, West Midlands
- Material
- Beach ply (Private maps), Sapele Red Wood (Corpoate Maps), All precision-carved
- Source
- Ordnance Survey records & historical town plans
Evidence of who we are, cut into old maps.
It has become accepted wisdom to say the English have no culture, or that it amounts to fish and chips and queueing. My 58 years of lived experience tells me that is not true and I have found it evidenced in the old maps of the places we live in, how they became what they are today. My own workshop stands a few hundred yards from where Round Oak Steel Works once was, the largest of its kind in Europe at its height, now nothing but lines on old maps and the memories of the people who worked there. That is exactly what I do not want to fade away.
See! this our fathers did for us.John Ruskin · The Seven Lamps of Architecture · 1849
When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “See! this our fathers did for us.”
That is the spirit of these maps. They are acts of preservation, of pride of belonging.
Why I do this.
When I show people these old maps, forgotten memories come flooding back. Old friends' names return. I've seen it most in older people not given to conversation, suddenly animated as dozens of memory triggers go off. The most gratifying moment I've witnessed was giving a map to a grandparent while a grandchild was present, and watching those memories, that legacy of memories, passed on. That is why I do this. The next challenge is letting people know I'm here.