We know how to count Bengal tigers. We know how to count blue whales, California condors, Javan rhinos. For each endangered species, there is a record, a status, a conservation plan. The IUCN has published its red list since 1964. The whole world uses it.
No one counted crafts.
Not jobs. Not economic sectors. Crafts – in the sense of transmitted gestures, embodied savoir-faire in hands, techniques that cannot be learned from a book. The kind of things that disappear silently, one retirement at a time, until the day there is no one left to show how it’s done.
In 2017, a British association decided to count them. Heritage Crafts published its first Red List of Endangered Crafts. In May 2025, the latest edition was released. It covers 285 traditional crafts. Five are classified as extinct. Seventy-two critically endangered. Ninety-three endangered. The rest are viable – for now.
The method: counting practitioners, not products
The principle is simple, and that is what makes it formidable. Heritage Crafts does not measure demand, turnover, or media visibility of a craft. The association counts people. How many people, in the United Kingdom, practice this craft professionally? How many teach it? How many learn it?
The categories follow the logic of the IUCN. “Extinct” means that not a single professional practitioner remains in the United Kingdom. “Critically endangered”: the practitioner base is extremely small, training is almost non-existent, economic viability is fragile, and transmission is compromised. “Endangered”: the craft still exists, but the trajectory is poor. The number of practitioners is decreasing, transmission is fragile, the market is shrinking.
It is brutal because it is objective. A craft can have a beautiful image, be the subject of documentaries, attract likes on Instagram. If only three people are left who can practice it and none has an apprentice, it is critically endangered. Period.
Five extinct crafts
The list of crafts classified as “extinct in the UK” is short. This only makes it more chilling. Five skills appear on it in the 2025 edition:
Hand stitched cricket ball making. Assembling a cork and wool core, compressing it, covering it with vegetable-tanned leather, hand stitching it. England invented cricket. It no longer has anyone to hand make its balls.
Gold beating. Hand beaten gold leaf no longer has a sufficient market in the United Kingdom to sustain an artisan. The technique still exists in Japan, where the kinpaku workshops in Kanazawa are living proof of it.
Wooden lacrosse stick making. The making of moulds and deckles for handmade paper, extinct after the death of the last British maker in 2017. And mouth blown sheet glass making, which disappeared more recently.
Each extinction has different causes. None is different in its result: a savoir-faire that existed for centuries has ceased to exist, and there is no way to bring it back.
Seventy-two crafts on borrowed time
The “critically endangered” category is the most worrying, because it is the last step before extinction. Seventy-two crafts are listed in the 2025 edition.
Silk ribbon weaving. For two centuries, Coventry was the British center for narrow silk. Almost no one left masters this savoir-faire.
Straw hat making. A rural craft that employed entire villages in the 19th century in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. Fashion changed, synthetic materials took over.
Hand knotting fishing nets. Not industrial nets, but hand knotted nets, adapted to a specific type of fishing, in a specific estuary. A handful of practitioners remain, all of a certain age.
The making of Scottish Borders bagpipes. Traditional saddlery. Pole lathe turning, the oldest form of turning, practiced in the forest with a pedal mechanism and a flexible branch as a spring.
The list is long. It has the rigor of an inventory and the melancholy of an obituary.
What France doesn’t have
France has the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant (EPV) label. It has the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF). It has the Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage, managed by the Ministry of Culture. It has the European Artistic Crafts Days. It has many things.
It does not have an equivalent of the Red List.
No French organization systematically monitors, craft by craft, the number of practitioners, the trajectory of transmission, and the risk of extinction, with comparable risk categories. The EPV label certifies businesses, not crafts. MOF rewards individual excellence, not collective survival. The intangible heritage inventory documents practices, it does not measure their viability.
Result: we do not know. We do not know how many wood gilders work in France. We do not know how many lissiers (tapestry weavers) still work on low-warp looms. We do not know how many glove makers remain in Millau, how many santon makers in Aubagne, how many beret makers in Nay. We have intuitions, impressions, press articles that say “the last” without ever checking if it really is the last.
Japan, for its part, has its Living National Treasures – the Ningen Kokuhō system – which identifies and protects master artisans who carry irreplaceable techniques. But again, this is a system of individual distinction, not an exhaustive inventory of the health of crafts.
Heritage Crafts occupies a niche that no one else has invested in: the epidemiology of savoir-faire. Not celebration, not certification, not distinction. Diagnosis.
Money and transmission
Classifying crafts is not enough. Heritage Crafts understood this and created an emergency grant fund – the Endangered Crafts Grants – which finances training, apprenticeships, and the transmission of critically endangered savoir-faire. In 2026, the fund will distribute a new series of grants.
The amounts are modest. A few thousand pounds to finance a six-month apprenticeship, an intensive internship, the purchase of specific tools. It is not a Marshall Plan for crafts. It is a bandage on a hemorrhage. But it is a targeted bandage: the money goes where the diagnosis has identified the urgency. A critically endangered craft, an aging practitioner ready to transmit, a motivated apprentice. The grant makes the connection.
In France, mechanisms exist. The fund for excellence savoir-faire, regional aid, programs from the Fondation du patrimoine. But without prior diagnosis, money is allocated randomly based on applications received, not according to actual urgency. We finance what comes forward, not what is dying.
What we lose when a craft dies out
It must be said clearly: we are not talking about nostalgia. We are not talking about old gentlemen in smocks doing picturesque things for tourists.
An artisanal craft is a body of tacit knowledge – gestures, intuitions, adjustments that cannot be written down. You can film a blacksmith for a thousand hours: you will not have captured what he knows. The exact pressure on the blade, the color of the steel that says “now,” the sound that betrays an invisible defect. These things live in the hands, not in books.
When the last practitioner stops, this savoir-faire disappears. Not temporarily. Permanently. You can find a manuscript in a library. You cannot find a gesture in a drawer.
Heritage Crafts has the merit of framing the question in quantifiable terms. How many? How many practitioners, how many apprentices, how much time? This is the prerequisite for any action. We do not save what we have not counted.
A model to import
The Red List is not a perfect tool. It is British, limited to the United Kingdom, based on sometimes incomplete data. Some classifications are debatable. But the principle – applying the methodology of endangered species conservation to savoir-faire – is relevant beyond borders.
France has more than 1,200 EPV labeled companies. Behind this reassuring figure, how many crafts are critically endangered without anyone knowing? How many savoir-faire rely on one or two aging practitioners, without an apprentice, without a successor, without the system even having noticed?
A French Red List would be needed. An uncompromising inventory, craft by craft, practitioner by practitioner. Not to decorate a ministerial report. To know where to act before it is too late.
Heritage Crafts has shown that a small association, with limited means, could produce a diagnostic tool more useful than many public policies. The fifth edition of the Red List is available online, free of charge. Two hundred eighty-five crafts, classified, documented, evaluated. Five are already gone. Seventy-two are on the brink.
The question is no longer whether something needs to be done. The question is whether we will do it before the list of extinct crafts grows longer.