Hart Gold & Silversmiths

Hart Gold & Silversmiths is the last operating workshop descended from C.R. Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft, the Arts and Crafts collective Ashbee founded in London's East End in 1888 and relocated to Chipping Campden in 1902 in an attempt to resettle craft production away from the city. The Guild itself dissolved not long after, but the silversmithing workshop survived: George Hart took over its management in 1912 and kept it running inside the Old Silk Mill on Sheep Street, where it remains today. His son Henry joined in 1930, and the business is now run by the third and fourth generations of the family -- David, William and Julian Hart, alongside longtime silversmith Derek Elliott -- continuing more than a century of hand-raising silver on the same Cotswolds site. The workshop makes domestic silverware, jewellery, and ecclesiastical and civic commissions, taking on pieces that range from a single hand-engraved thimble up to a complete tea service, all still shaped and finished by hand rather than cast or machine-formed. It is one of the few Guild of Handicraft workshops anywhere still producing under its original craft, on its original site, run by descendants of the man who took it over just over a decade after Ashbee founded it.