"Step inside the workshop of the Wellington Carriage Company, and you enter not just a different century, but a different world, with its own private language and its own dusty rhythm of doing things.
"The walls are lined with rows of primitive iron tools, the floors are heaped with sawn-up lengths of oak and ash, and on every work surface little solidified mounds of wood-shavings bear witness to work done many long months ago.
"It’s the kind of cobwebbed kingdom you imagine some Harry Potter-type wizard to inhabit, and in some ways what happens here is indeed a kind of lost magic.
"The entire enterprise is the creation of softly-spoken, faded-blue boiler-suited Philip Holder, who, at 66 years of age, is not only the firm’s founder, managing director and sole employee, but also one of the few old-fashioned wheelwrights still working in this country. For 50 years, he has operated from this same little warren of sheds in the middle of rural Shropshire, quietly building up his reputation as repairer and constructor of horse-drawn coaches. Now, at long last, his talents are to be trumpeted further afield, with the news that his one-man carriage-building operation has been named winner of The Daily Telegraph-sponsored Best Traditional Business category, in this year’s Countryside Alliance Awards..."
Read the remainder of the article
No comments:
Post a Comment