Meet Lawrence Neal, one of the last makers of rush-seated chairs in the UK

Lawrence Neal is standing on the banks of the River Avon, hoping that the grey clouds above are not an ominous sign of what is to come. For some 50 years, he has spent two weeks every summer harvesting the rush required for the seats of the traditional ladder-back chairs that he is known for – a style, as the name suggests, characterised by the horizontal slats of wood that form the chair’s back. ‘You get to know the bits of the river you can walk in,’ says Lawrence, who gathers around 500 small bolts every summer using a large slashing hook. All along the bank, long green rushes are piled up, tied together neatly in bundles with blue and white baler twine. Soon, they will be loaded onto a trailer and taken back to Lawrence’s workshop, just half an hour down the road in the Warwickshire village of Stockton, where they will be hung up to dry.

Lawrence is one of the last makers of rush-seated chairs in the country. He learnt the craft from his father, Neville Neal, when he joined him as a 15-year-old apprentice in 1966. ‘I always knew that I’d become a chair maker,’ says the craftsman, who took over the business when his father died in 2000. He produces an average of two to three chairs a week and counts architectural designer Ben Pentreath among his customers. The 11 styles that Lawrence makes – from modest side chairs to grander rocking chairs – are based on works by Arts and Crafts designer Ernest Gimson. It was in the workshop of Gimson’s collaborator, Edward Gardiner, that Lawrence’s father started out as an apprentice in 1939. ‘If it hadn’t been for my grandmother hearing Gardiner’s call-out on the Home Service for an apprentice, it might never have happened,’ says Lawrence. His father worked with Gardiner for almost 20 years, taking charge after Gardiner’s death in 1958 and soon afterwards moving to a new workshop.

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Lawrence remains there today in a quintessential maker’s den. Ash chair frames, in varying stages of completion, hang from the ceiling, while bundles of dried rushes are piled up on the floor, ready for weaving. There are some concessions to the modern world – a handful of mechanical saws and a sander – but, on the whole, Lawrence continues to use the tools and techniques that were employed over 100 years ago. For each chair, there is a set of wooden templates for the various components – the slats, the seat rails, the arms. ‘These have been passed down through the generations,’ he says.

Like the chair makers before him, Lawrence works in ash and oak, sourcing from local woodlands and sawmills. Most has to be dried before it can be used, so Lawrence will cut the trunks into smaller logs and leave them by the stove for a couple of months. However, some wood – known as green – is used straight away to form the back of the chair and the front legs. ‘This is the traditional way of making these chairs, as the green wood will shrink and hold the whole thing together,’ Lawrence explains. Once the frame has been assembled, the rush seat is the final – and the fiddliest – part of the process. ‘It takes about four to five hours to make a seat,’ says Lawrence, dunking a bundle of rushes in a small trough of water before he begins weaving. ‘They need to be damp, or else they will break.’

Sometimes, chairs dating from the Sixties and earlier come back for a new seat. ‘I look at the finials on the top of the legs and can tell whether it was made by me or my dad,’ Lawrence says. One of his long-standing clients is Hugo Burge, the owner of Marchmont House in the Scottish Borders, who has been buying chairs from Lawrence since the Nineties and has collected some 140 antique rush-seated chairs over the years. Aware that Lawrence was nearing 70 years old and concerned that there were very few makers producing traditional rush-seated chairs, he offered to fund two apprentices for Lawrence. Once their training was completed, he would give them a studio in his newly opened workshops, Creative Spaces, at Marchmont House. The Heritage Crafts Association got involved in a call-out that was very reminiscent of the one Lawrence’s grandmother had heard on the radio over 80 years ago and, in 2018, Richard Platt and Sam Cooper joined Lawrence in his workshop.

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The pair, who already had some ex-perience in woodwork, spent almost two years learning Lawrence’s craft. They say the rush weaving was the ‘most challenging element’, but that ‘something clicked after about four months’. Last April – with Britain in lockdown – Richard and Sam moved to the Scottish Borders and launched The Marchmont Workshop. The pair already have a year’s worth of work from private clients and interior designers on their books. ‘We’re mainly producing the chairs Lawrence makes, but we’re hoping to revive some of Gimson’s tables, too,’ says Richard.

Going forward, Lawrence is hoping to focus on smaller orders, while The Marchmont Workshop will be taking on the larger commissions. Frankly, it is impossible to imagine that Lawrence will ever quite be ready to lay down his tools. As he says, ‘I’ve given my life to these humble chairs'.

Lawrence Neal Chairs: lawrencenealchairs.co.uk
The Marchmont Workshop: themarchmontworkshop.com