The Goldsmiths’ Review 2025/26
Seek out the earliest records in Goldsmiths’ Hall’s archives and you will find reports of hallmarking, training apprentices and charitable giving. On the eve of our 700th anniversary, while the world around us has changed immeasurably, the Goldsmiths’ Company continues these same activities. Ours is not a relic, but a living tradition: with steady purpose, we evolve with the times. This year’s Review reflects the breadth of that tradition.
Skyrocketing gold and silver prices have dominated the year. Over and again, just as it seemed that they couldn’t climb higher, another price ceiling was smashed. The cost of raw materials is among the greatest challenges our industry faces. Makers and manufacturers are responding with innovation, as Rachael Taylor writes.
Meanwhile, as scrutiny of metal provenance increases, traceability matters more than ever – an issue that Betts Metal’s Single Mine Origin (SMO) initiative seeks to tackle. Joanna Hardy reports on mines in Senegal and Western Australia that have accepted SMO’s challenge of responsible production.
The cost of gold is not the only issue facing our industry. Continuity of skills and training new entrants for specialist roles, such as stone setting, is another. In 2012, the Goldsmiths’ Centre was set up to meet this challenge, alongside providing affordable workspaces and business support. The Centre’s Founding Director, Peter Taylor, retired this year, after 40 years in the industry. The legacy he leaves has not only opened routes for new entrants, but has also nurtured the culture needed to support them to thrive.
The positive impact of the Goldsmiths’ Centre is real, as profiles of two Young Apprentices of the Year illustrate. Jeweller Finn Hemmings and silversmith Luke Potts are at the start of a journey where technical precision underpins creative inventiveness. Twenty-five years into his career, jeweller Darren Sherwood, who perfected his craft at high jewellery houses before founding his own brands, shows this principle at work. The common thread is how mastery of skill facilitates originality of voice.
Master jeweller, silversmith and hand-engraver Alan Craxford, with over 50 years in the trade, is renowned for his technical virtuosity. He is also an exceptional colourist, in whose hands colour takes on a philosophical, even mystical meaning. Melanie Eddy picks up this theme in her survey of a new generation of makers innovating in colour across traditional materials and unexpected ones, such as nano-ceramic plating, electronic waste and Formica.
Colour, Eddy says, is a source of joy and we hope that the Company’s Collection is one too. The Collection records the Company’s history through objects, although gaps remain across the centuries. Timothy Schroder writes about a lucky find in an auction catalogue that filled one such gap. Social history unfolds through the Collection too. Charlotte Dew traces trends in contemporary cutlery back to the 15th century, while Robert Keirle highlights one of the Collection’s more intriguing pieces: a silver playing-card holder that may have started life as a prosthetic.
Until 1926, the Company collected only historic silver; that year marked a turning point, when it began to commission and exhibit contemporary work too. This year, we celebrate its anniversary with an exhibition spanning a century of silversmithing. Dora Thornton explains how the Company worked to stimulate design excellence, nurturing the careers of generations of silversmiths. As all these writers remind us, silverware can be functional, decorative or a display of wealth – and sometimes all three at once. Everyday objects sit alongside the strange and the spectacular.
Underpinning these stories is a commitment to valuing and celebrating human skill and imagination. The Goldsmiths’ Foundation is the modern manifestation of what, in the Middle Ages, took the form of charitable alms. Today, the Foundation focuses on funding training in jewellery, silversmithing and the creative industries, support needed more urgently than ever, as Fiona Thompson explains. The impact of this, and of all the Company’s work, is richly illustrated in the pages that follow.
None of this would be possible without our members who give time, expertise and generosity to our work. I give my thanks to you all. As the composer Gustav Mahler put it, tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. That is what Goldsmiths’ does: we tend the flame of a living tradition. – Annie Warburton, CEO & Clerk, the Goldsmiths’ Company