Jonty Hampson, Woodworker
HAMPSON WOODS
cumbria by way of hackney
Before Jonty Hampson upped sticks and moved his workshop to the bucolic Lake District in 2018, he spent eight years in the decidedly grittier urban landscape of east London, crafting serving boards out of foraged timbers. Founded on ethics and sustainability – long before those were buzzwords – Hampson Woods is the antithesis of mass-production, a fact that has won Jonty bespoke interiors work from the likes of Hawksmoor, Tom Kerridge, the Ace Hotel and Fortnum & Mason. But it’s his distinctive boards, each of quirky character, that have found fans around the world – whether it’s a sleek rhomboid, grain swirling like the clouds of Jupiter, or a classic long-necked version, seeming to stare quizzically at you from along the kitchen wall.
“I was living on Shoreditch High Street when I first decided I wanted to work with wood. I moved there straight out of uni because it was still half-occupied and a fascinating place. And it was cheap. A lot of the architecture there is Victorian light industrial and really beautiful – you can faintly see the ghost signs on buildings of various businesses, including old furniture makers.
Finding exactly what it was I wanted to do was a long process which involved many jobs and several countries. From not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I did a business degree, then spent my 20s and 30s living and working in east London but also in Cumbria, Brooklyn, Long Island and Austin, Texas. I'd always pursued creative ventures, doing writing, photography, making things, paying my way by working in bars, restaurants or as a woodworker.
I thought I’d like to be an antique restorer. There were quite a few of them at the time in Shoreditch, so I knocked on some doors and ended up working pretty much for free for an antique restoration firm in Stoke Newington, then worked various carpentry jobs for a painting and decorating firm, repairing windows and doing simple shelving. Whenever I was in London between travelling I’d be doing a lot of carpentry and cabinet work, and the more I worked within people's homes, the more of a taste I got for the interior side of woodwork.
The last proper job I had before setting up Hampson Woods was in Brooklyn, working for an amazing restaurant design-and-build company – basically a collaboration between a restaurant, restaurateur and an artist. That taught me a lot about combining practicality with aesthetics and designing in an effective way for an environment that needs to be as slick as it is beautiful.
“if you want to know where your runner beans are grown, why not know where the things you chop them on are from as well?”
Jonty Hampson
I knew that I wanted to make wooden products and that I wanted to be workshop based. In 2010, I found an old Cockney mechanic who rented me a corner of his workspace in Hackney and from there I started making trays, boards and coasters which I sold off a stall in Greenwich Market for about a year and then at Broadway Market for the following eight years. The wood was sourced from a guy who cleared a lot of street trees, including the first London plane we worked, which had been standing in Russell Square and came down in a storm. We kept going back to him, and then the smaller pieces were foraged from the woods around my family’s property in Cumbria.
I was aware that there was an appetite for stuff made in small batches, and luckily there was demand from retailers wanting things made more locally – they were all unanimous in saying they were tired of importing 10,000 chopping boards from Vietnam.
A decade ago, there certainly wasn't much talk of sustainability and provenance within craft, yet it was always a no-brainer for me, especially that further connection to the food industry. If you want to know where your runner beans were grown, why not know where the things that you chop them on are from as well? Why not use wood that’s grown and made in the UK? Three hundred years ago, you’d go to the next village to get some wooden plates for your family, and that plate maker, that turner, would know where his timber came from. It’s what we did for millennia, before the last 60-70 years changed everything, so really it's just reverting back from rampant consumerism to the old ways.
I think there's been a bit of a resurgence of that, thankfully – it’s something that’s been taken up really well by restaurants like Hawskmoor, who were one of our first big customers. It just makes sense to keep the community and everything as local and sustainable as possible.
London itself seems like a series of villages, like a little ecosystem, and that's very much the way Hackney and east London have worked from my point of view. There’s a general creative hum that runs around the area which is sort of socially entrepreneurial. It's exciting, and it involves a lot of talented folk winging it. There's a lot of adaptability within creativity, which is why I think areas like east London have thrived culturally.
“i’ve always thought of my boards as almost human, as anthropomorphic”
The style that you’d determine as Hampson Woods took a while to get to. Initially there was more colour involved, though the ethos was always about the wood doing the talking and using different cuts and repurposed stuff. The first boards that the brand is now known for first came about as part of an interior job for E5 Bakehouse. We made boards for them to serve their cakes and pastries from and did some good old interiors work, including building their counters, some of their cabinets and the giant wooden table that they use for their bread classes. I’m happy to say, we still sell a few of our boards there as well.
Timber selection is a massive and very time-consuming part of our process, but I’m such a fan of wood that I can find beauty in all of it. The London plane is incredible; it has such a dramatic grain. Depending on how it's sawn, it can vary from being quite tight and uniform in colour to swirled, lacy and almost pixelated and multicoloured. It’s not something that had really been out there before – it was used in small doses in veneers, marquetry and guitar-making – so that’s why I think it worked very well for us. Then there’s ash, elm and oak – more common but equally amazing. Elm has a natural water resistance within its oils, while ash is the strongest timber there is. It also has a huge history; it was used to make the first wheels, the first tools… It’s what everyone's plates and cups were made from back in the day.
We have quite a holistic approach to our wood. You can almost always get boards out of a batch of timber, so that’s what we look for first. Then, if we find a particularly exciting, stable, wide or dramatic piece, it will be set aside for either a commission or something personal. The spoons, utensils and pegs for our racks are all designed as off-cuts from board making.
Once we've marked and cut out a board by hand, the majority of the work is sanding, from shaping right down to finish. We always work with the piece in hand and do it all with great patience, taking it bit by bit to a comfortable and smooth form.
This is when I find myself doing a great deal of thinking. There's something meditative about a stack of boards that need working. The raw material is such a beautiful thing, and you also get enough start-to-finish processes completed to actually be very satisfied by it.
Where I live now – three miles outside Windermere in the rolling Lake District – is where my brother and I were both born. I was really little when we moved down south, but this house has been in the family since 1972. There’s no doubt that having spent a lot of time walking around the woods, chopping branches down and dealing with trees in my young years, being brought up to be with nature, shaped my aesthetic.
I’ve long had a fascination with people and was brought up to appreciate Henry Moore's work, so I’ve always thought of my boards as almost human, as anthropomorphic, each one slightly different from the next. You end up with a more dropped shoulder here, a slightly rounder head there. There's always plenty of character going on.”
For more, visit hampsonwoods.com
Photography: Magda Kuczmik (portrait); Robin Sinha (boards in progress)
@hampsonwoods
