Today, I am delighted to share Papermakers of the Lake District — a new film, a written dispatch, and a labour of love.
I first discovered James Cropper Plc and the Paper Foundation in 2024. After meeting Mark Cropper, the mill’s 6th-generation proprietor, I was utterly enthralled by its story.
Indeed, the interplay between craft, industry, and innovation is the foundational idea behind the launch of Nation of Artisans.
Yet, my love for the mill only grew after finally visiting. Indeed, it was on the treacherous, rainy drive back down to London from Burneside last December, as I ruminated on the interlooping, creative power of craft and cutting edge that the idea for The British Cræft Prize started to clarify in my mind.
To work with Christian Cargill bringing this to life has been a total joy. Further, I am utterly in debt to Mark, Tom Frith-Powell, Mandy Clement and everyone at James Cropper Plc and the Paper Foundation for letting me into their world so I can tell their story.
Now, the wonder of Cropper is immortalised in this film and the essay below.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
— Louis Elton, founder of Nation of Artisans
Papermakers of the Lake District
It all began with some good old-fashioned incest. All the best businesses do.
Long before James Cropper Plc was a renowned paper and advanced materials factory, it was first a plucky young Quaker’s elaborate ploy to woo his cousin. In 1842, the original James Cropper, just nineteen, proposed to his cousin Fanny Alison Wakefield. His family were not best pleased.
Determined to get closer to Fanny, he left his wealthy industrialist family in Liverpool for a small Cumbrian village called Burneside. Nestled on the Lake District’s majestic River Kent, then the home of 57 paper mills, he decided to buy one and launch a career as a paperman.
Young James was not at all interested in paper. Later in life he confessed to his grandchildren: “In truth, the whole aim of my life, since I was seventeen, was to win your grandmother’s love and make her my wife.”
Yet what started as a love story became a remarkable business. Today, James Cropper Plc is the only remaining fine paper mill in Britain. Six generations of Croppers and 175 years later, Burneside remains a sleepy village with fewer than two thousand inhabitants, yet James Cropper Plc is something of a powerhouse: the business turns over £100 million a year and employs 500 people.
In a world where tech bros and environmentalists have mounted a pincer campaign against paper, Cropper’s remains mighty and defiant. Though likely unaware, everyone in Britain has been touched by James Cropper. From school exercise books and remembrance poppies to beautifully packaged luxury goods and mounted pictures, Cropper’s paper is omnipresent. So are its advanced materials. If you’ve sat on a plane, taken the bus, or used electricity generated by a wind turbine, Cropper has shaped your life.
But what is paper, really?
Standing in a cowshed on the edge of his garden, Mark Cropper, a sixth-generation papermaker and the business’s current chairman, runs his hand through a sink filled with a translucent milky-white liquid. “It’s nothing,” he says. “Yet if I take this mould — which is effectively Chinese two-thousand-year-old technology, made of wire and wood — and go in here… within seconds the pulp and water become paper. There’s no other chemistry involved.”
“When you witness paper being made,” Mark says, “it’s like seeing magic happening. How you take, almost by a miracle, this slurry of water and plant, and within seconds turn it into the most versatile and useful material, perhaps, there’s ever been. It is this incredible gift that nature has given us — really nothing more than plant and water.”
Deindustrialisation has hollowed out British manufacturing, while computers have rendered paper almost irrelevant. How on Earth has James Cropper survived?
The answer lies in the business’s founding philosophy: if you keep it in the family, do what you do out of love, connect dots across disciplines, and never shy away from pursuing creative, niche routes out of sticky problems, you can survive anything.
From catastrophe to colour
James eventually married Fanny in 1845. Yet, just a few years into his papermaking career, disaster struck. Once upon a time, paper was made from discarded rags. The rag-and-bone man would collect surplus linen and cotton fabric to be pulped and transformed into paper. The industrial revolution sparked a paper boom, but success almost triggered its own demise. “With the mechanisation of the paper industry, there simply was not enough raw material left, because before that date all the paper in Europe was made from waste rags,” says Mark. “But by the 1850s there simply wasn’t enough of it, and wood pulp, which everybody equates with paper, had not yet been invented.”
With doom on the horizon, the original Cropper, unable to make clean white paper, decided to pivot. “We bought in any old source of dirty fibre — we couldn’t make white paper with it,” Mark explains. Taking inspiration from the emerging dye industry, Cropper bought in samples of the world’s first artificial dye — mauve, invented in 1856 — and started dyeing dirty fibre into coloured paper.
That first great niche put James Cropper on the map, and still stands the business in good stead today. Cropper’s is now one of, if not the, greatest coloured paper makers in the world. A tour of the factory quickly reveals that countless luxury brands from all over the world are indebted to Cropper’s mastery of colour.
High-end packaging is both an art and a science. For brands that promise excellence at every touchpoint, colour is everything. The sun, however, is a beastly enemy. Brands may invest millions in trademarking a specific shade, but UV light doesn’t care. With just a few hours of exposure, it can break the spell by discolouring the packaging. Cropper’s 175 years of expertise in the chemistry of coloured paper has led to ingenious ways of managing the way colour degrades. This, and countless other innovations, have made Cropper the world’s go-to destination for luxury packaging.
By embracing this tightly bound circuit of craft, industry, and innovation, Cropper has been able to consistently forge excellent products and shake off one crisis after another. “Since the early days of the business,” Mark says, “we’ve always pursued niches, always pursued the latest market, the latest technology. I think that’s one of the key reasons we’re still here.”
Zigging against the zag
Having warded off the great rag shortage of the 1850s, Cropper continued the tradition of transcending crises by zigging where all others zagged. Fast forward more than a hundred years to the 1980s, and Cropper faced another upheaval. With the dawn of the neoliberal era, deregulation and the widespread offshoring of British manufacturing, the previous generation of Croppers looked at the creaking factory and resisted the winds of global capital.
Like many Croppers before them, they refused to dine out on the genius of the past. Ignoring the prevailing wisdom, they doubled down on Burneside and bet everything on modernisation — even to the point of madness. “In my father’s time, they spent over £40 million in the 1980s rebuilding the whole factory,” Mark explains. “The business at the time was worth less than £10 million, and all of it was borrowed at a time of high interest rates. Everybody thought it was crazy.”
Yet that galactic investment bought the future of the company. Touring the factory, Mark explains that its extraordinarily complex, labyrinthine plumbing and wiring is the business’s great defensive moat. “You simply could not replicate it. It has taken generations to create this place. Even if a billionaire, or the Chinese government, decided they wanted to replicate what James Cropper does, they couldn’t. It would just cost too much.”
This great complexity is evidence of the power of multi-generational businesses, but also the seed of potential tragedy. “When they go, you can’t do it again,” Mark says, mourning the loss of other great foundational industries. “You cannot bring an industry back from extinction. You can’t just grow it overnight.”
Contrary to what the neoliberal economists and management consultants would no doubt have advocated — unbundling, offshoring, optimising each part separately — Cropper’s tightly integrated circuit of craft and manufacturing has been a boon for innovation. Not only was the great rebuild an investment in the core business, it also fostered expansion into the then-uncharted waters of advanced materials.
A material revolution
In 1982, as the factory was being reborn, one of Cropper’s directors, John Larking, was on an aeroplane and happened to sit next to a man who had just received a grant to build a carbon fibre factory. “Carbon fibre was a new-fangled thing that people didn’t quite know what to do with, but they knew it was useful.” Larking wondered: could they make paper out of it?
Yet while paper is plant fibre cellulose bonded by water, carbon fibre does not bond so easily. So Larking went into a lab with another director, Nick Willink, and secretly they made sheets of carbon fibre by hand. “They tried lots of different binders until they found one that worked.” Then, Mark explains, “they sent that sheet off to a materials laboratory in Durham to be tested, and it had all these amazing properties: it could conduct, it could insulate, it could shield against different spectrums of electromagnetic interference. It had all these wonderful things. And then what they did was adapt a papermaking machine — entirely their own creation.”
Today, that invention is extraordinarily valuable — to the business, but also to material innovation across a variety of industries. “If a piece of photocopier paper is 80 grams per square metre,” Mark lights up, “we can make a material down to 1 gram per square metre.” It is so light it can float on the heat rising off your hand.
These properties have remarkable real-world value for the industries of tomorrow. “Our materials are in about 80% of all modern composite aircraft. We have materials that go into wings to dissipate a lightning strike on an aeroplane. We make a similar material that goes into wind turbine blades for the same job. We have materials used for insulation in aircraft cabins. Our materials have even been used in Formula One.” One day, they could even shield future data centres in space from solar flares.
Mandy Clement, who has spent nearly twenty years at the company and now runs innovation for the Advanced Materials division, is constantly delighted by spotting James Cropper in the wild. “There’s a saying that we’re only so many metres away from a James Cropper product in whatever we do,” she says. An avid cyclist and owner of a carbon fibre road bike, she is pretty sure James Cropper materials are in it. “Every time I ride it, I think: oh yeah, I put this in here!” “You won’t see it,” she says, “but it will be around you.”
Countercultural craft conservation
Yet while Cropper may be incubating the cutting-edge materials of tomorrow, it is Mark’s work on the heritage crafts of the past that is arguably the family’s most counterculturally pioneering project. Across the world, the traditional craft of handmade paper is collapsing. With paper mills closing due to falling demand, and an ageing generation of master papermakers retiring without successors, Mark sensed an opportunity to rejuvenate the craft for the twenty-first century.
“While wanting to take the advanced materials business into the future, I’ve also been led back into the past, back to the craft that created the industry.” When he moved back to Burneside from London thirteen years ago, Mark sensed the village needed revitalisation. The industry, and society itself, had become entirely detached from the craft of paper. Animated by a desire to celebrate paper and reconnect the mill with the village, Mark launched the Cropper family’s latest niche innovation: the Paper Foundation.
Starting with an old shed at the back of his house, Mark launched the Foundation in 2016. He had acquired the equipment of Griffin Mill in Ireland — a Royal Warrant-holding handmade paper mill that was closing without a successor. Soon after he enlisted Tom Frith-Powell, a former employee of Damien Hirst as the Foundation’s first apprentice.
Tom moved to Burneside in 2019 and learned traditional techniques from retiring master papermakers in Ireland. Then as Covid-19 struck, he continued his apprenticeship over Zoom, spending each day making paper and posting samples to Ireland for critique, improving batch by batch. It was the only way to learn a craft for which no formal apprenticeships exist.
The Foundation quickly won a series of fascinating commissions — developing paper wall lights for Lulu Lytle’s Soane Britain in collaboration with the Japanese artist Kuniko, as well as a special watermarked edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In just a few years, the Foundation has built up an impressive client base: the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have since turned Soho House’s old bedsheets into stationery for all their hotels — and done the same for various paper connoisseurs who cannot be named.
The Paper Foundation, now itself a Royal Warrant holder, is technically a separate charity from James Cropper Plc. In practice, it is the living proof of the thesis that craft, industry, and innovation are deeply entangled — their value springing not just from resisting the globalised managerial impulse to break up the co-location of design and manufacture, but from the active investment in fostering the continuum between heritage craft and cutting edge. As Tom puts it: “what’s unique about this village is that you can follow papermaking from how it was done in the twelfth century to how it’s being done in the twenty-first. That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”
For Mark, the Foundation started as a quest for a more intimate connection to paper, one he had previously lacked: “The business was there, but I couldn’t honestly say, ten or twenty years ago, that I had a visceral connection to my industry. I now do. Because I think when you understand where something has come from — if you understand the craft — I think you understand the cutting edge. And I think the joy for me is mixing that all together.”
As his knowledge of the craft grows, it sharpens his appreciation of the deep entanglement. “The craft of yesterday is actually the industry of today and tomorrow. That’s lost on people because they simply don’t understand how things are made. But very, very often there is that absolute direct link.”
Walking through the advanced materials lab, Mark stops to watch a team slowly unwinding a roll of carbon fibre material bound for an aerospace application, picking out impurities with a scalpel — the same gesture, performed with the same delicacy, as the Foundation’s papermakers removing flaws from handmade sheets with a razor blade a kilometre up the road. Two thousand years of papermaking history, expressing itself identically, with completely different purposes. “You’ve got this ancient material and absolute cutting edge,” he says, “and yet the kind of attention, the kind of love that’s being put into it — it’s the same thing. Even where you deploy science at the cutting edge, you still need art. That to me is the extraordinary thing.”
The Don Quixote of Paper?
In an age of AI maximalism, is Mark Cropper the tragic modern-day Don Quixote of paper, a noble knight defending its virtues in a world that no longer needs it?
No. Almost a decade into his conquest, the Paper Foundation’s mission is starting to look increasingly sensible. “I think paper has been given an unfair reputation. In the last ten, fifteen years, we’ve all been actively encouraged to embrace digital media like nothing else and use less and less paper. There have been campaigns saying paper has a footprint, it’s environmentally bad, you should use less of it.” But Mark thinks the tide may be turning: “what we’re realising now is that actually the digital world carries perhaps an even bigger footprint — almost unfathomable. And right now, that is not just environmental. It’s actually almost biological. We’re beginning to understand that the screen and the habits being fostered in us from childhood are having a real impact on the wiring of our brains, on our mental health. These are really significant things.”
While scores of thinkers and writers from Jonathan Haidt to James Marriott mourn the smartphone revolution and its consequences — the collapse of reading and the dawn of the post-literate society — Mark is surprisingly hopeful: “What is humbling and exciting for me is that a lot of what we all need to do, myself, our schools, our children, is actually to get back to paper. Because whether you are reading, writing, or drawing on paper, you are not feeling all those potential negative impacts of the digital world. You have a medium that is the gift of concentration. You can’t swipe a piece of paper. The pace of it is your pace. You’re not overstimulated. Your imagination is running at a far more steady, healthy speed. People have forgotten that’s even available to them. This is not anti-digital. Digital tools are incredible. But when it comes to how we use our time as human beings on this planet, I think we should have less time on screens and more on paper.”
James Cropper and the Paper Foundation’s continued success is the perfect rebuttal to the consultants, economists, and techno-utopians who would have rendered both obsolete. In a moment where AI threatens to hollow out Britain’s service economy and screens erode what remains of our shared culture, Burneside offers a different model. Interdependent with nature, nourished across generations, and igniting its greatest innovations by connecting the past with the future, Cropper’s offers an enchanted vision of the best that a British business can be. Both defiantly rooted and boldly inventive, stewards of heritage and trailblazers of the future, infinitely plucky and willing to make big bets to forge the world of their dreams — whether it’s developing the materials of the future, reviving the craft of the past, or simply chasing the forbidden fruit of love.
Now, if you enjoyed the story of James Cropper and the Paper Foundation, in film and in word, then please subscribe to Nation of Artisans — and share it with the world.
Nation of Artisans is a quest to spark a renaissance at the intersection of craft, industry, and innovation. This film was created entirely pro-bono, for the love of paper and the magic of James Cropper and the Paper Foundation.
If you share it with just one person who you think will appreciate it, we can grow bigger faster.
If you would like to support the project, you can become a paying subscriber to Nation of Artisans — or you could simply order a pair of our special edition boxer shorts. Or indeed do both. Both is good.
After Shoemakers of Northamptonshire, this is our second documentary. If you have a factory or workshop that you would like Nation of Artisans to film for Episode 3, then please get in touch. We’d be delighted to talk.
Credits
Created & Exec Produced by Louis Elton
Directed & Cinematography by Christian Cargill
Produced by Dalmatian Films
Edited by Tom Gilfillan
Colourist – Nathaniel Skeels
Edit producer – Luke Spencer
Production Assistant - Hugo Williams-Ellis
Post production by The Shop
