A treasure Unearthed

In a dusty factory on a fairly busy road through an industrial part of town, there lay a hidden treasure. Undisturbed for many years, the contents of this forgotten trove waited patiently. Waited for their moment of becoming. At this time of year, it’s a nice thing to re-watch the BBC’s The Detectorists. If you haven’t seen it, seek it out. Undoubtedly a masterpiece, this quintessentially British TV show is, at its heart, about discovery. The search for and eventual uncovering of things thought lost. The magical moment of taking in your hands an item held years before by some other person. Someone you might never have met. And yet they poured their heart into its making. Just for you, it feels like.

On a long overdue tidy-up of the Brooks England factory, we had the good fortune to experience this feeling of discovery for ourselves. A small number of leather tops, which had  – for whatever reason – been waylaid on their journey through the making process. We resolved to complete these saddles; to let them become what they were always destined to be. This collection, which we are calling Unearthed, is rare not just because of the craft and precision that goes into it. We have only the tops that were cut long ago. We can make only those models for which the leather was intended.

Martin Shepherd is the director of operations for Brooks England, based out of the factory in Smethwick. He described the circumstances of how he and his colleagues re-found the ‘lost leather’.
 
“It came to light when we had a tidy up ahead of the Open Factory this summer. We were going through boxes of stuff that had been ‘put somewhere safe’ and as we went through we started uncovering the tops. Very quickly we decided we wanted to finish their journey. To make them into what they were originally destined to become.”
 
It wasn’t as simple as digging these products out and putting them up for sale, though. There was plenty more that needed to be done. Rivets hammered, polish applied with equal-parts acumen and elbow grease.

Not all were in the same state of progress. Some of the leather still needed to be conditioned. None had been attached yet to rails. Some had to be discarded as part of our rigorous quality testing processes.
 
“The leather was in differing conditions,” says Shepherd. “Some had gone past the point of repair because it had not been stored correctly, but we rescued as many as we could. After our inspection processes, we cleaned, polished and revived the tops.”
 
Luckily, there’s no greater concentration of knowledge about what exactly a piece of leather needs than that which can be found in Smethwick.