Inside Every Knot and Grain is a Box

Weekend Telegraph Saturday, May 6, 1995

Christian Dymond meets Peter Lloyd, who fashions fine wooden containers out of lumpy, gnarled and knobbly wood Some time ago a 30lb lump of elm arrived at Peter Lloyd’s home in Cumbria. The sender was a woman in Cornwall who had seen his work at the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and wanted him to produce a box from that particular piece of timber.

This is not how Lloyd normally receives his commissions and he would not encourage others to follow suit. A craftsman prefers, it seems, to choose his own materials: “It was rather odd; this strange, gnarled, knotty piece of wood turned up in the post van one day with a label on it.” Sadly, the worms had got there first, so Lloyd burned the wood and fashioned a box out of another piece instead. In nearly six years as a box maker he has made 192 of them, every one a one-off.

When it comes to raw material, Lloyd has a predilection for the ostensibly ugly. “I often see timber which other people might reject. Wood with lumps and lots of grain. It can be difficult to use but the results can be beautiful,” he says.

From the way he talks about the boxes, expansively carving their shapes in the air with his hands, it’s obvious he’s enormously attached to them. If there’s any pain involved in Lloyd’s job, he admits it’s having to part company with the finished product.

What makes the parting bearable is not so much the price, a box fetches (£400-£600; last year one went for over £1,000) as the fact that yet another distinctive piece of English hardwood is ready to take it’s place on the bench for working up.

Peter Lloyd, one-time air-traffic controler, now with his feet firmly under the bench. 'I use timber which other people might reject...The results can be beautiful'.

His favoured woods are oak, elm, walnut and sycamore. Sometimes he used spalted beech, the spalting caused by fungus getting into the tree after it has been felled, resulting in wavy black lines running through the wood. He also loves burrs, the lumps which grow out of the main trunk of a tree and reveal a lovely grain when cut.

“A piece of wood suggests how it wants to become a box,” he says. “I take a section of timber and sketch on it until I can see a box coming out of the wood’s natural forms. One bit may suggest a lid, another some hinges.”

At one side of his workshop in Cumbria lie the planks of wood which have already been stored for a year outside under cover. After a year inside, they are planed and then kept for another six months to reduce the moisture content further before the real work begins.

In a room next door, the finished boxes, polished with natural beeswax and complete with inner trays of ripple sycamore, are lined up on shelves. “I like to think I’m taking a 400-year-old piece of timber and giving it another 200 years of life,” he says.

Lloyd has already had a few thoughts on his epitaph: “Maker of fine wooden boxes” is how he would like to be remembered. It is hard to envisage him in his previous incarnations as an air-traffic control assistant and department-store executive.

Becoming a woodwork teacher was the pivotal step towards his present occupations. “I became a box maker because I didn’t think there was a huge number of unusual, quality jewellery boxes on the market and the size of my original workshop more or less dictated that I make something small rather than tables or wardrobes or cupboards,” he says.

Jewellery is not the only thing people buy his boxes for. They are used for stationary, sewing materials or, in the case of a local vicar, taking communion wine to the bed-ridden.

This spring, Lloyd did a spell as a craftsman-in-residence at the Grizedale rural arts centre and theatre in the Lake District. Today, his own workshop in Hallbankgate, Cumbria is open as part of the North Pennines Festival. “His work is absolutely brilliant,” says Bill Grant, director of the Grizedale Society. “Marvellous,” says John Anstey, another fan, who has six boxes and who loaned his City offices to Lloyd last November for a two-day exhibition. Evidently now is the time to commission a box – before people start talking about owning a “Peter Lloyd”.