From Britain with Love

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While most companies believe their success depends on continually increasing productivity, analysing the latest trends and never standing still, there is one English company which prides itself on changing nothing. The tools and levels of craftsmanship that are needed to make Yard-O-Led’s timeless silver pens and pencils have remained unchanged for generations.

It’s a little known fact that the world’s most distinctive pens and pencils are made by just eight highly skilled craftsmen working in a Dickensian workshop in Birmingham’s atmospheric Jewellery Quarter. It takes more than 2,000 strikes by hand to give one of Yard-O-Led’s solid silver pens a hammered ‘Victorian’ finish, eight different processes to make its clip and a final moment of patience to individually number it after it has been hallmarked. Each fountain pen, pencil and ballpoint is, quite literally, a unique example of traditional English craftsmanship.

The Yard-O-Led workshops are full of old but beautifully maintained machines and tools that are every bit as durable as the craftsmen who use them. No other pens in the world are made using such traditional skills at every stage of their creation. With so few people now having the skills the company needs, Yard-O-Led is helping to keep English craftsmanship alive.

Because each pen is made by hand, no two are exactly the same. For example, each craftsman creates the hand-chased ‘Victorian’ finish in his own way and so although each one is perfect, a trained eye can still identify a particular ‘signature’. That, coupled with each pen and pencil being individually numbered and hallmarked, makes each one, quite literally, unique.

Many of the handcrafted designs that Yard-O-Led creates, epitomise the fashions that shaped British style from the first half of the nineteenth century right up to the present day. For example, the Perfecta with its Victorian finish sums up the new found opulence and style of Regency Britain, while the Corinthian reflects the revival of interest in classical Ancient Greek architecture at the end of the Victorian era. The bold four-sided Deco was inspired by New York’s earliest skyscrapers and the Deluxe 60 captures the mood of the 60s perfectly.

A Yard-O-Led pen, pencil or fountain pen is the perfect way to make your mark with a piece of handcrafted English luxury.