Every essay, in one place

For three hundred years one yard in the East End cast the bells of half the world. Then it went quiet. What a town loses when it stops making the loud things.

I baked from a single 1390 household book every week for a year. The bread was better than I expected, and the rules around it were stranger.

The ink of Magna Carta and most medieval books is made from wasp-stung oak galls, rusty iron and gum. You can make a bottle this weekend.

Before canals and railways, salt left Cheshire on the backs of packhorses. Their roads are still there if you know which hedges to follow.

Agnes Ruddle has lettered certificates, gravestones and one royal charter. She still practises the alphabet every morning before she answers email.

Our grandparents darned socks because they had to. We don’t, and something slipped away with the habit that had nothing to do with money.

Medieval readers argued in the margins. The tiny notes they left around the text became glosses, then commentaries, then the humble footnote.

A Victorian apprentice spent his first month sharpening other men’s tools. Here is the routine he learned, and why it still works on a Sunday.

A small community in the Welsh borders still copies books by hand. I spent three days at their desks and came home unable to rush a sentence.