Part two begins, as promised, with Louis pulling down his trousers. The underpants in question — a toile de joie printed with pastoral scenes labelled Seductio, Commiditas, Protectio — turn out to be the origin story of the entire British Cræft Prize. What started as a quest to produce bespoke boxer shorts from Northern Irish linen eventually mutated into a £60,000 national prize for maverick craftsmen.
The conversation then turns to whether cræft can serve as a binding agent for a country that no longer shares an informational commons. Louis presents his framework of 16 Dreams of Britain — from Royal Britain and Workshop Britain through to Silly Britain (Mr Blobby, cheese rolling, Paddington Bear as psychopomp) and New Britain (Stormzy’s stab vest, Oswald Boateng’s BA uniforms). His claim is that excellence in making — the deep hand-eye-mind entanglement of cræft — cuts across all of them. Calum pushes back hard: these are competing aesthetic and moral universes, not fragments of a whole.
Submit to the British Cræft Prize. £60,000. Deadline: 31 August 2026. [link]
The episode explores:
The boxer shorts to national prize pipeline, via Saint Pantalone
Why Irish linen is grown in Flanders
The 16 Dreams of Britain and whether they can coexist
Calum’s objection: competing aesthetic universes cannot be synthesised by goodwill
Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism and Paul Ricœur’s defining question
Hiroki Azuma’s database animals and the collapse of the grand narrative
The Magdalen College library debate: homage or imposition?
Why the Anglofuturist typeface has borrowed from five traditions and still doesn’t have a full alphabet
The Peter Thiel two-by-two and why definite pessimism has no joy
Sprezzatura as the missing ingredient in British national renewal
