Archives for May 2020

I grew up in Hampstead, North London, in a flat above my father's motor repair business. An elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Baker lived next door. Ernie Baker was born in 1902, and had been a cabinet maker. In his youth has worked as a violin maker, but apparently there had been no future in that. Some of his tools were in the communal garden shed and I have used one of his gouges on every one of the scrolls I've made. He died in 1980. Ernie came with my parents to one of the open days at … [Read more...]

I have a lovely workshop which we had built in the garden in 2006/7. The site is tricky; the clue is in the name of our local area, Brooklands, and probably the house was built where there was once a pond when the area was fields. To comply with planning regulations with regard to the overall height, the workshop had to have the floor level about a metre below ground level, and it's built on a piled concrete raft for stability. However, it was a challenge to seal it against water ingress when … [Read more...]