There’s Always a Way
At Netherton, we make products that we like and use ourselves. We're enthusiastic about the things that we make. I've been designing cookware for a pretty long time now, but about 18 years ago, I was really getting upset with the types of products that people were asking me to make for the mass commercial market. Because every year, things just got a little bit thinner and a little bit cheaper and they didn't last. So I started making things for myself. At first I made pans, casserole dishes... and then friends would say, can I have one as well? It really started from there and it was really quite simple. We decided we didn't want to use PTFE (Polytetrafluoroethylene) on our pans. We'd rather have them seasoned and other people sort of said, “Hey, that's a great idea. Can you make me one”?
PTFE is the non-stick plasticky coating that you see on lots of frying pans and saucepans. People have come to think it’s essential, but it isn't. There's lots of other ways of doing it if you want a non-stick pan. At Netherton we go back to a traditional approach of seasoning pans. We didn't invent it. I suppose we’re making 1870s pans. If you came out of the 1870s and looked at our frying pans, you'd say, oh, there's nothing new there.
Partly it's about the provenance of materials. We like to know where all our materials come from. We get all of the oils that we use from a Flax Farm in East Sussex, the farmer there produces the most beautiful flax oil. In fact, she fairly recently got organic status. So it's big news for her. We season all of our pans exclusively with her flax oil, which is really hard-wearing and we bake it on. So when you get a pan from us, we’ve baked that on for a good couple of hours, at phenomenally high temperature, really, really hot, much hotter than you get in your own oven, and it lasts.
We visit every little component supplier. We know who they are and a big part of running the business is making sure that we get that relationship with people, whether it be the guys who chopped down the Oak tree, who is my favourite character. A guy called Cedric. I'm not too sure how old Cedric is, but I think he's pretty similar to the age of a lot of his trees! He's got a bit of Woodland about five miles south of us and he'll chop down two or three Oak trees a year and then he'll keep them sawn up into big planks. He’ll keep them there for about two years, seasoning them in his barn, before he'll actually let me have a look at them. Then we'll have an argument about whether he's going to sell me this Oak or not. He'll only sell it to me if he thinks it’s going for good use, I love that actually, it usually goes for restoration for churches, pews and things like that. And it took a while to persuade him that I was going to put the wood to good use. I would never do something terrible with his Oak because he's proud of what he does. I feel privileged to use his trees.
The point is I know where it grew and who made it. And also I know that he is really, really enthusiastic about replanting. Actually he's been doing some quite interesting things in the forest, where he's been removing lots of the softwoods and ensuring that there's a really good mix of growth. So there's trees of different heights and it's actually a much better habitat. He's determined that when he leaves this planet, it’s going to be better than when he came.
So, that's part of it. That's one of our sources of materials, and it's great seeing people like Cedric, it's never a chore going to see a supply like that. We get to the point where we can't make every single part of the pans, although it would be lovely if we could. But what we're doing is we're taking all the big bits of metal, we're taking the wood, we're making planks into handles. What makes our product special is the spun iron. We make some cast iron pans, but the spun iron is a pan that you can live with every day, because it's lighter than cast iron, but still very durable.
We hate people throwing things away and we certainly don't want our products to be thrown away. So the pans can be repaired, we will send you the parts to do so yourself. Or you can send the pan back to us. We don't advertise it, but we do actually repair our competitors pans too. There's a big famous American cast iron company. Their traditional products are really lovely. We had a collector of these products come to see us in tears because for some reason, he left them in storage and they got rusty. He turned up in his Land Rover almost down to the axles, it was so heavy with about 50 of these pans. It took us about six months to restore them all. When we had a quiet moment, we'd put one in the shop, blast it, re-season it, and they looked lovely at the end of it. He was cheerful, he isn't a customer of ours, but it seemed a shame that he had these lovely pans going to waste. So we restored them one by one.
The way we describe our making process is, let’s take a black iron pan for example. We'd start with a big sheet of black iron and in this case, that will be about two millimeters thick. About half of that would end up in a pan, it would be about half the weight of those famous cast iron French ones, but a lot heavier than something that you might buy in the supermarket.
All our iron is processed in the UK. Quite a lot of it in South Wales, there's only really one or two people who are doing this now. We chop that sheet into a big circle and then it'll go into the machine - it looks a bit like a lathe and it's spinning at about 2000 RPM. And then it gets worked by hand, we get a big metal pole and bend the material around a spinning former. What actually happens is, as the two touch together with this pole, you get a lot of heat and the material becomes plasticy and it then starts to move and spin into shape. You can do a couple of things if you wanted, to make a really cheap pan like that. You can make it very thin up the sides, but actually, we don't, we want the same thickness on the sides as on the bottom. So we're moving that material around to the sides. If you look carefully, you can see the little grooves on our pans. The material becomes wrought, as in wrought iron, as it works up there and that makes it a little bit stiffer. Then it's trimmed at the end and we take that off.
The next stage is forming the handles, which we bend. Then depending on the handle, it’s quite important to get the bends right. That's when the chef will come along and say to me, no, no, that's entirely wrong. We need 15 degrees or 30 degrees. They quite often have very strong opinions about this and a lot of it is to do with the height of the cooker. We then rivet the handles on the solid black iron rivets. In the catering world and with the cheaper, imported pans, they are welded on and that's often a point of failure. The handles can eventually bend or crack. We use rivets that are made in the Midlands, by this guy in Ashby de la Zouch. there's only two people in the UK who can actually make them. The rivets are then annealed in a furnace for 24 hours to get really soft, that's done in the Black Country. When they get to us, they're actually quite a soft rivet and then we, by hand with a fly press, rivet them on again and actually, they're tough enough as we hit them there. So it's a very strong way of putting a handle together. That riveting is really, really important.
The final part of this pan is the oak handles. It's kind of interesting with British Oak. It's often got character, every one's different. Very occasionally people who don't get us and don't understand, wonder why we have a different grain on each pan handle. It depends where it came on the tree, how old it is and I have to say, I like character. There are certain customers and certain shops who will actually say, look, find me ones with character and oak is wonderful for that. And the handles themselves, we cover them in a natural wax which seals them and it keeps the water out. Finally, we've got some brass screws to hold the whole thing together.
Our logo is made in a brass former and it's heated up on something like a big soldering iron and burned in by Mandy, who does it much better than I can. She'll put that logo on the handle, which is an important, final part. We are very proud of our logo, which shows the Iron Bridge on it. We're located just south of the Iron Bridge, our works are on the grounds of the former coal mine, because that's where their iron bridge gorge was. It's there because it had iron or a bit of coal, bits of limestone, lots of trees you could turn into charcoal. There was everything there that you needed to make iron in the 17th century. That's where the industrial revolution started and we're on the site of that former coal mine. There’s a story, which may or may not be true, that there was originally a prototype of an iron bridge put up here in the yard. Of course, it doesn't exist now, and there's various stories about where it went. Maybe a bit of it ended up in Stourbridge canal. My personal view is like all iron goods, it was probably melted down and it's probably in one of our pans!
Before I made pans, I went to art school then did some engineering. So I combined the two and my first couple of jobs were actually working for big grown-up corporations, making power tools and washing machines, kettles etc. I designed lots and lots of products that were being produced overseas, and they were produced in enormous volumes. Of course many of those products would only last just slightly beyond their guarantee period and that creates a lot of landfill. 10 years ago I decided enough is enough, I’m not going to do this anymore. We're going to make the things that we want and then sell them to people who are going to appreciate them.
The first product we made was really very much an experiment and we were doing other things alongside it. We were still designing a few products for other people, and we just did that less and less as it became less interesting, and Netherton Foundry became much more interesting. Soon my wife, Sue became more involved and did a great job of just telling people about what we do. She has no sales background at all. I have to be honest, we are not really very good at selling. People often come and find us. And thankfully, when they find us, they seem to quite like what they have, and that makes the whole thing work. I suppose it's also social media. 20 years ago we couldn't do what we're doing now because we couldn't tell people about it, now through social media, people find us, we can talk about it and that's great.
We've made some really good friends through this. It's interesting for people who see what we're doing, to see what our friends are doing too, maybe you can only say so much about frying pans, but what people are doing in those pans, well, I know you can talk about a long time about that!
So far we’ve never found anybody who's actually got in touch to say “I've worn your pan through” and we've not had a handle fall off. People that have had the old accidents with the pans, which includes a guy who did manage to run over one in a camper van, but we sorted that out.
We've got a favorite chef in Shropshire, a guy called Chris Burt. He spent a lot of time in Japan and he produces stunning Japanese food. At one point in the restaurant he was running, he had about 30 of our woks. They'd been running for about two and a half years when he came to see me to get some more. He wanted us to put some new handles on some ones which had been on the gas fire. I said, “these pans are looking a bit bashed, how do you feel about this? Do you want some new ones?” He wouldn't let me replace them because they have character and he liked that, because he likes to cook in the open. So we bashed out the dents and just threw them around a lot and put a few new handles on if they needed to, and I they're still going strong there now.
I hate throwing things away. There's always a way of sorting these things out. That's absolutely the mantra of our business.
Netherton Foundry