In Conversation With: Andy Cutbill, The Modern Ruralist
Andy Cutbill is the founder of The Modern Ruralist, a community that has grown past 150,000 people across Instagram and Facebook in barely a year, built on short films about the people keeping Britain's rural crafts alive. We caught up with him following a weekend at The Game Fair, where he curated the inaugural Modern Ruralist Craft Yard - nine makers working live in the open air rather than behind glass.
Your career has spanned advertising, television, publishing, Westminster and now The Modern Ruralist. What's the thread that connects it all?
Storytelling, in the end. Andy started out writing and creating television for the BBC and Channel 4, then wrote six children's books that sold over a million copies, before a long detour into advertising and Westminster — including time spent shaping policy around industrial hemp. Coming back to The Modern Ruralist, he said, was really a return to that original thread, and to a curiosity about looking into other people's worlds.
Was there a specific moment that made you realise you wanted to build something around this?
Andy had been making short films about sustainability projects — an initiative tackling the Asian hornet, a Cornish business recycling nylon from old fishing nets — when he found himself filming a fertiliser-from-seaweed maker on a Herefordshire farm. Walking up the field, he noticed the farmer's son standing beside what turned out to be one of the first computerised Massey Ferguson combines ever built, and mentioned it almost as an aside. A project used to a few hundred views suddenly had 65,000. That, plus a visit soon after to Devon's last working oak bark tannery — where he'd been offered twenty minutes and stayed four hours — was, in his words, really where The Modern Ruralist was born.
There are 285 heritage crafts still practised in the UK, 72 of them classed as critically endangered. How do you choose who to film?
Not by chasing "lasts," Andy said, though there are plenty in his films — John Williamson, the only person still making Devon stave baskets commercially; Greg Rowland MBE, whose family has made wheels the same way since 1331. His filtering process is a five or ten-minute phone call to work out whether someone has enough charisma and story to hold four hours of footage, and whether he'd want to take them to the pub afterwards.
Is there a myth about rural craft you're constantly trying to correct?
That it's gentle, and that it belongs to an older generation. Andy pointed to Barney Murray, a 27-year-old dry stone waller in North Wales who taught himself Welsh and worked on this year's Chelsea Flower Show Best in Show garden, and to Greg Rowland's apprentice-turned-journeyman, Sam. The wheelwrights bonding a steel tyre onto a wheel with fire and water, sending up clouds of steam over the crowd, was for Andy proof that these are demanding, physical trades — not "nice" ones.
What did you want people to take away from the Craft Yard?
Andy described wanting the crowd to feel they'd found something real among The Game Fair's retail stands — something they could join in on, not just watch. He singled out the glassblowers Amy and Charlie, whose furnace holds a small pool of molten glass at up to 1,500 degrees, and Ali Wade, the pole lathe turner happy to hand visitors the tool rather than a microphone.
What does preservation have to do with staying relevant?
Everything, in Andy's view. He compared craft to language: the moment it stops evolving, it dies. He cited Mark Cropper's paper foundation, which brought techniques from an ultra-modern factory back into handmade papermaking, and the two art students at Macclesfield's Victorian silk mill who taught themselves to run Jacquard looms with no manual, because none existed.
If you had a month to spend in one maker's workshop, whose would you choose?
Jeremy Atkinson, the clog carver in Kington, Herefordshire — the last one, Andy discovered, he hadn't even known still existed. Atkinson works barefoot but for his own clogs, in a house indistinguishable from his workshop, telling stories about the mill girls whose clog irons once served as the town's alarm clock.
Where can members find The Modern Ruralist?
On Instagram and now Facebook, with around sixty short films live and longer-form work on YouTube planned this month. Next up: a plaster moulder, a lobster potter, and an eel potter.
Keep an eye out for further events with Andy and The Modern Ruralist — we may be bringing a mini Craft Yard to some of our houses.
