United Kingdom · Jewellery; Goldsmithing; Welsh heritage
Aur Cymru — Welsh Gold Jewellery
The Welsh gold jewelry tradition — the working of the specific gold from the Clogau St David's mine near Dolgellau in Snowdonia, whose characteristic pale yellow-orange color (from its specific copper and silver alloying) has made it the traditional gold for British Royal wedding rings since Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's ring in 1923. The Welsh goldsmith reads the correct alloy character of Clogau gold through the same heat-color assessment as other gold traditions, here specifically calibrated to the distinctive pale color of the Welsh gold alloy at working temperature.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not listed; Welsh gold jewelry on the Welsh national heritage inventory
The historic plasterwork conservation tradition of English heritage buildings — the repair and conservation of the ornamental lime plasterwork found in historic English interiors (country houses, civic buildings, and cathedrals), using the…
The making of the decorative bas-relief sprigs (individually applied relief elements) for Wedgwood Jasperware — the unglazed fine stoneware with colored body (the iconic Wedgwood blue, sage green, or black) and applied white relief…
The bespoke tailoring tradition of Savile Row — the most internationally recognized men's tailoring tradition in the world, distinguished from made-to-measure by the construction of a floating canvas chest piece (rather than a fused…
The hand-forged table knife tradition of Sheffield — the specific craft of forging the bolster (the metal collar between blade and handle) as an integral part of the blade by drop-forging, which distinguishes authentic hand-forged…
The Old Sheffield Plate tradition — the technique of fusing a sheet of silver to a block of copper and rolling them together to produce a silver-surfaced copper sheet used for hollowware, candlesticks, and flatware.
The making and use of coracles — light, keel-less, one-person boats — on the rivers of West Wales.
A multi-stage decorative steel technique combining engraving, acid etching, gilding, nickel-plating, and bluing on sword and dagger blades, developed at the Imperial Arms Factory in the Ural city of Zlatoust after its 1815 founding — where…
A shallow-engraving decorative silverwork technique historically centered in the Armenian city of Van, in which a design is cut into a silver surface and filled with niello, a black alloy of sulfur, copper, silver, and lead melted into the…
Gujarat Dhokra is the lost-wax casting tradition practiced by the Dhokra Damar tribal community in Kutch and Banaskantha districts of Gujarat — the westernmost expression of the Dhokra tradition already documented in West Bengal…
The hand-forging of Korean bronzeware (yugi) from a precisely alloyed copper-tin mixture into tableware, vessels, and — using the identical technique and material — traditional percussion instruments.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nuremberg, master goldsmiths turned rare imported natural specimens — nautilus shells, ostrich eggs, coconuts, rhinoceros horn, coral — into elaborate princely showpieces for the Kunstkammer, the…
The forging of the jambiya, Yemen's iconic curved dagger, and the elaborate silver ornamentation of its sheath, a craft specifically distinguished within the wider regional jambiya tradition by Yemen's long-standing expertise in silver…