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What If We Stopped Buying Stuff and Started Making It?

What if people stopped buying stuff and started making it?

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BBC Radio 4 - What If We Stopped Buying Stuff and Started Making It?

Meet the crafts people behind the current revival in making and repairing belongings.

What would a homemade world look like? Tim Hayward meets the makers and repairers who are challenging us to think harder about the stuff we own.

What do we really understand about the stuff we own, what does it mean to us and what would the world look like if everybody started to buy less and make more?

Writer and occasional knife-maker Tim Hayward meets the crafts people and repairers who are challenging themselves and others to think harder about the things they buy, use and throw away. How has consumerism warped our relationship with the objects we use everyday and how would our lives be different if we understood how stuff was made?

Barnaby Carder, aka Barn the Spoon, is a green woodworker and “spoon tramp” working out of his Hackney shop while, over in Herefordshire, Joel Black and Holland Otik run a community pottery and blacksmith's forge. Other contributors include Laura James who co-founded the Cambridge Make Space, Clarry Elliot who helped set up the Leeds Repair Café, and designer and Cabinet Maker Poppy Booth.

A homemade world might seem like a sweet, nostalgic place, but the contemporary rise of making is having complex and unpredictable results.

Produced by Michael Umney
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 4

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