Types of Work

We opened in June 2010, Designing, Creating and Teaching, We strive to take your ideas for your home and garden and make them a reality, by breathing life in to iron through the ancient art and craft of traditional blacksmithing.

Melissa Cole Artist Blacksmith
Melissa Cole is a bronze medal holder and Fellow of The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths. She is internationally recognised for the craftsmanship of her hand-forged ironwork.
Melissa’s work ranges from commissioned gates and railings to sculpture and fine art installations. She combines contemporary design with forged and fabricated metal for external public spaces, private gardens and interiors.
Melissa has been featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs, BBC’s Escape to the Country and Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, and her work has been described as “Metal work that flows and wraps around itself, taking your eyes on a journey producing pieces that are solid in make-up but light and free in their aesthetic quality” – www. The WithLoveProject.co.uk
Based in the Pewsey Vale, Wiltshire, Melissa’s work is informed and inspired by her rural surroundings. Sculptures based on the topography and landscape of the varied Wiltshire landscape evoke the organic forms of the rolling Downs.
Small and delicate pieces often worked in series or as cast limited editions are inspired by natural elements discovered in the Savernake Forest or encountered whilst exploring the local footpaths, by-ways and bridleways.
Melissa works to commission with private clients, designers, community and corporate projects producing fluid architectural elements, sculptures and site specific sculptural pieces from forged steel and wrought iron. She also runs blacksmithing and sculptural metalwork courses from her forge in Wiltshire.
Melissa offers private blacksmithing classes and metal sculpture tuition as well as specialist SEN teaching of blacksmithing and metal sculpture.

Drawing is fundamental to my art.

I want my work to entertain in the same way that music does, to make the metal dance. It’s about communicating – it’s joyous. I like to think I can show people another world.
I originally studied painting at Chelsea College of Art but started making sculptures twenty years ago, when I discovered the combination of strength and malleability of metal when heated. Drawings quickly become forms.
The images that I portray tend to be derived from the natural world or from classical and mythological sources, but I’m also very interested in the mechanics of things, practical technology, and my most recent pieces sometimes include a kinetic aspect. The school gates I designed and built in Brighton as a public art commission demonstrate a marriage of artistic and technical abilities.
As well as fine art sculpture I produce bespoke metalwork, public commissions, and furniture. I also conduct art workshops for schools, colleges and teachers.

Hot forging is at the core of what I do at Bringsty. I will design and make items to commission, for galleries, exhibitions and demonstrations. I will also repair and restore existing and historical ironwork, and make items to a client’s specification. The process of producing bespoke ironwork to suit the site and client is what I enjoy. Taking a client’s vision for an empty space, and realising their vision by guiding them through the possibilities and practicalities that hot forging, traditional and contemporary techniques can bring to items of originality and longevity.

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Artist Blacksmith Fred Suffield & team work from a 200+ year old forge based in Lincolnshire.
Traditional and contemporary ironwork made to commission. We work with private clients, interior designers and architects to work on unique bespoke ironwork projects.
Also qualified for specialist heritage ironwork restoration and conservation.

I am a self taught artist blacksmith working from the Godinton House estate near Ashford in Kent. I began teaching myself forgework in 2012 as a distraction from illness and have gone on to develop my own style.

Hello. I’m Owen Phillips – Artist Blacksmith at Gate Foot Forge.

…and it’s all been something of an accident! A background in Industrial Design and 15 years doing graphics is a strange route into this profession, but here we are. From a childhood spent tinkering with things, a love of machining and metalwork at school and an Industrial Design degree furthering those skills and developing design and visualisation techniques, I was all set up for a career making stuff with my hands. Then I somehow fell into graphics and spent a decade and a half sitting on my arse staring at a screen.

It was only back in 2019 when the hobby – which was clearly a result of an itching desire to make stuff – began to get out of control and accidentally became my job!

How did I get here?

I have always made stuff with my hands. My childhood was spent taking things to bits, and making things out of the parts. Through school, the stuff I enjoyed most and ultimately succeeded at was the practical metalwork and woodwork under what they term as “Design and Technology” nowadays. I further developed these skills at University and then, for most of my adult life, space to tinker was always a limitation. That was until 2016 when I moved back into my childhood home in a little hamlet called Gate Foot. Finally I had a workshop space.

During one tinkering session, I ended up building a small forge in order to heat treat a blade for a knife project I was working on. On a whim, I shoved some metal in there to get it hot and bend it about and came out with my own hand-forged flint striker…. and a bit of a blacksmithing bug!

The little forge was replaced with a slightly bigger one and I began to bend more stuff about. I consumed books and YouTube videos and began to learn the traditional techniques that would latterly have been passed down, craftsmen to apprentice, for thousands of years.

Roll on Christmas 2019 and lots of my friends and family find themselves getting hand-forged trinkets as gifts, and the inevitable questions get asked; “are you selling these?”, “is this a new venture?”, etc. And I have to admit to myself I’m enjoying it a lot more than sitting and clicking at a screen – and the stuff isn’t coming out half bad. I resolve to try and spend a bit of time tinkering away and pushing it to see if it goes anywhere – while maintaining my freelance design job as regular income.

Then along came a little thing called COVID-19. My design work – for which my clients are mainly in the hospitality and events sectors, all but dries up. Strangely, while the world goes bananas, I have an opportunity to push the forge business ahead and see what happens…

…and it turned out that quite a lot of people wanted nice hand-forged things. The orders rolled in. Within a month I’m shipping products from my garage to the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and have an order book with 3-weeks’ wait. I’ve re-invested most of the profit at the point back into tools and equipment and so haven’t quite broken even – but I have been only working half a week whilst childcare for a 2-year old isn’t available due to the lockdown.

Three months later, lockdown is easing. Nursery is open. I can work nearly a full week… my order book is still full, I have a full workshop of tools, and I appear to have accidentally become a blacksmith…

Not many people can say they genuinely love what they do for a living. I consider myself fortunate that I can get up in the morning, light my fires and spend my days working on a craft as old as the hills which I still consider to be some kind of magic.

There has been an Overwrought Ironworks in Hastings for many years providing the community with the traditional services of an iron worker. However it was only in 2014 when Tobias Cobrin took over the sadly silent workshop, and built and then lit his handmade forge, did it spring back into life and become Overwrought Forge, providing the full range of handcrafted and handforged products from small domestic items to gates and railings.