Tightrope Knots

Gem Bowes is one of a small handful of people still making rope by hand in Britain. She works out of a Cambridgeshire workshop, hand-spinning cotton, flax and dead-stock yarn into something useable: a lead for a Labrador, a doorstop with the weight of a small dumb-bell, a set of juggling balls that will probably outlast their first owner.

Learned on Arthur Beale's floor

Her route in was theatrical. She read for a BA in set building at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, threaded three years of student and fringe theatre in Edinburgh through the side of that, then spent nearly seven years at Arthur Beale, the Shaftesbury Avenue chandlery that had been making rope and ship-fittings since the 1500s before it closed its physical shop. That is where the rope work came from. She learned it on the floor, surrounded by sailmakers' tools and brass blocks, in a building that had been doing the same job for four and a bit centuries.

Cambridge is home: born and raised there, recently relocated back. The workshop is the engine room and the leads are the steady seller, but she is open about wanting to make almost anything anyone can describe to her. "I love problem solving how to make someone's design ideas a reality," she told me, "and I might regret saying this but I don't think any idea is too crazy!" Bespoke is not a sideline; it is the appetite.

Rope-making sits on Heritage Crafts' Red List of Endangered Crafts. There are very few practitioners left in the UK, and almost none working at this scale, by hand, in colour. The craft as Gem practises it is tactile and slow: each strand measured, looped, twisted with the right tension so the finished rope has a particular springy give. The work she does is, in the most literal sense, keeping a skill alive.