What is everyone talking about this week: The man creating the new Turner Prize

I love meeting Renaissance gentlemen. They are few and far between these days, a bit like dogs walking on their hind legs. Of the extant specimens in the genre, one in particular has caught my eye. Louis Elton, a 29-year-old Cambridge graduate who consults on tech and culture businesses, is coming up the ranks. Everyone is talking about him.

Or, more specifically, his project. Louis is the founder of Nation of Artisans, an initiative that spotlights Britain’s most innovative craftspeople and aims to spark a renaissance in artisanship and manufacturing. The platform’s video series, ‘British Cræft Futures’, imagines how our country might draw upon ‘the deep wisdom of its heritage crafts to inspire innovation and solve our biggest challenges’. Note the æ in cræft, which harks back to Anglo-Saxon, when it was a term not only for manual skill, but for the virtuous application of knowledge to produce excellence.

The first episode featured a device called the TechnoWithy, a crustacean fishing apparatus inspired by Cornish withy pots. The traditional withy pot is both time- and labour-intensive (it takes two weeks alone to dry out the willow before weaving the strands together into a basket). This one is made easier by 3D-printing the pot from marine-safe biopolymers. Louis's project, which just turned a year old, aims to show through such stories that technology is not inimical to heritage, but can, indeed, preserve it for future generations.

Nation of Artisans is supported by a grant from Emergent Ventures. On March 12, Louis is throwing a party at Sotheran’s Rare Books in Covent Garden, where he will announce the launch of the British Cræft Prize (‘I hope it will be like the Turner Prize, but for craftsmen at the cutting-edge’). ‘We are looking for maverick and misfit makers, designers, engineers and innovators to forge something ingenious,’ he says. Candidates will compete for a prize pot worth over £60,000.

His initiative comes at an opportune time: interest in craft is at an all-time high as Britons, young and old, return to the analogue. ‘I’m on a mission to Make Britain Make Again,’ he wrote in his manifesto on Substack. Of all the projects he’s had the privilege of visiting, Louis's favourite might be James Cropper PLC in the Lake District, where ‘an intimate understanding of fibres and water’ allows experts ‘to make not only beautiful writing paper’ (using up-cycled bedsheets from Soho House and the Royal Family), but also ‘advanced materials capable of stopping lightning downing a plane’. How spiffing.

This feature originally appeared in the March 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.