On the roof

Emma — Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘An excellent, beautifully written book’ Patrick Galbraith, Sunday Times ‘A rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular and traditional … a beautifully written craftsman’s memoir’ Daily MailThatched roofs are like living organisms: each one a web of repair, replacement and alteration, shaped, dressed and re-moulded by every pair of hands that works on it.Thatching is one of the world’s oldest crafts – an ancient trade that roots us in nature, as Tom Allen discovered when he quit an office job to become an apprentice in Devon. Now a master of the trade, in On the Roof he goes in search of its history and future, meeting fellow thatchers, from the son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune grass in the Hebrides, to a Syrian refugee who found peace among the seagrass roofs of Denmark, to one of the first women to master Japan’s 5,000-year-old thatching tradition.Eye-opening, beautifully told and revealing a tradition hand-shaped over centuries, On the Roof is a story of how we live with the land and how we have chosen to treat it.

On the roof

Emma — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The reed goes on, the reed comes off. The reed rots and returns to the earth. The houses we work on outlast us. The thatch we use has never stood still.On The Roof is a thatcher’s tale – a journey of discovery, and a reflection on what it means for a person or a building to belong in a place. It tells Tom Allan’s story, leaving an office job in the city to find fulfilment among the Devon roofs, as well as the stories of six other people who share his trade. We meet the Hebridean son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune-growing grass, a Syrian refugee who found peace among the seagrass roofs of a Danish island, and one of the first women to become master of Japan’s 5,000-year-old craft of thatching.Thatching is an ancient, living tradition. To be a thatcher is to belong to a craft almost endless in its reach – at once one of the oldest ways of giving shelter, a way of working close to the land, and a deep immersion in the rhythms of a place on the most local scale possible: a village, a valley, an island.But the craft isn’t frozen in time. Thatched roofs exist in a constant state of repair, renewal and alteration, and the trade is poised at a moment of profound change both in the way people thatch, and the plants they use to thatch with. As Allan reveals, the story of thatching is the story of our relationship with the land, and how we havechosen to treat it.

Allan, Tom – The Bell Bookshop

On the roof

On the roof