In Deptford, south-east London, Holly Loftus hand-crafts between 10 and 15 knives a month. The least expensive of these could be yours for £160, while the dearest might set you back as much as £580. What do you get for your money if you seriously splash out? Loftus, who was born in Ireland and is soft spoken and gently thoughtful, takes her time with this question. “It’s to do with how much time I’ve spent combining different steels,” she says, hesitantly. “Some of the knives involve a layering technique – people know it as damascus steel – which creates a pattern on the blade. It takes a long time. There’s a lot of folding and cutting and hammering.”
Such a knife is likely to be with its owner for a good while – perhaps for ever. “I’m lucky,” she continues. “The people who buy my knives have a strong sense of what they’re getting. It’s not going to be the same as an off-the-shelf, factory-made knife. They know they’re going to have to look after it.”
Loftus didn’t set out to be a knife-maker; she used to do community work. But then she got talking to someone in the knives business. “Once I realised it could be done by hand, something about it took hold of me: it got stuck in my brain, even though at the time I’d never made anything at all. It was an infatuation. I spent a long time reading about it, and eventually I decided I wanted to commit. I went on a course in Scotland – it was for farriers, because there isn’t really anywhere you can learn to make knives professionally – and it was there that I found out how much I loved to forge: getting the heat into the steel, and once it’s plastic, moving it with your own body and the hammer … It was amazing.”
She never looked back. “I found a forge in London [Blenheim Forge – of which, more later] and I trained with them for three years, learning to make chef’s knives.” Is she the only woman who’s doing this kind of work right now? “I think I might be the only one who’s doing it professionally,” she says, judiciously.
Loftus uses steel not only from Germany and Japan, but also from Sheffield, my home town and a city that was once famous across the world for its cutlery. The handles of her knives are made of cherry, hawthorn and yew, and each one is unique. But if they’re beautiful, they also need to work, to be functional to the highest degree. “Knives are having a moment, because cooking has been made more accessible. If you don’t cook, you absolutely don’t need a nice knife; if you do, a well made one makes all the difference. A lot of people think they’re useless at slicing and dicing, but they’ve just got blunt knives. Owning one that stays sharp and is easy to sharpen changes everything.” Buyers, though, should beware companies that boast their knives are handmade when in fact they’ve simply stuck a handle on a blade whose provenance is unknown. “Transparency matters,” Loftus says. “I know what steel mills I’m supporting, and almost all the wood I use comes from felled or fallen trees in London.”
What would she say to someone who’s on a quest to buy a new knife, and panicking at the choice? “Think about what you’re cooking, and think about what kind of investment you want to make. Any knife can be made sharp, but how long it stays like that is determined by materials. There’s a trade-off. Stainless steel typically gets blunt faster than carbon steel, but carbon steel will rust, so it’s not for you if you want a knife you can leave wet.”
What’s the best way to sharpen a knife? “I use Japanese whetstones. But for people at home, the best thing is a ceramic honing rod, which looks similar to a steel, only the material is less aggressive. It takes away less of your knife, so you’ll have it for longer.” I think of my granny’s carving knives, now in my kitchen, the middle sections of which are on the verge of disappearing thanks to constant sharpening on old-fashioned steels. My own odyssey, it seems, may turn out to have more stages than expected.
Last January, I reached a place of acceptance. There was just no getting away from it: my knives were blunt, and some of them were knackered in other ways, too. One had a handle that was missing a rivet; another had unaccountably lost the tip of its blade. I hate waste, but it was OK. I had owned them for 30 years. It was time to spend some money.
In the era of my first flat, I went to John Lewis and bought a selection by Sabatier, a name I knew from my parents’ kitchens. Easy! No one seemed to care much about knives then, let alone fetishise them as certain male cooks do now. Books about knife skills, and classes that teach them, were unheard of. The choice was limited, even for those with pots of money, and internet shopping had not been invented.
But my, how things have changed. You could spend months looking, and still be undecided. European or Japanese? Factory-made or handmade? And how many different shapes and styles do you need? I exaggerate only slightly when I say that the cash it’s possible to spend on a kitchen blade now seems virtually limitless. Even John Lewis stocks a Japanese-made gyutoh knife by Miyabi with a blade that incorporates a “101-layer flower damascus design”, and a handle made from birchwood – a snip at £459 (reader, I didn’t buy it).
In a muddle myself, I start on this piece as a way of sorting things out in my head, and Loftus is the first person I speak to, on the phone from Ireland: I feel so intimidated by macho Knife World, I want to fire my stupid questions at a woman, not a man. “That makes sense,” she says, when I confess this. “I’ve a lot more women followers than men on social media.”
But as things turn out, Knife World isn’t so scary after all. When I email James Ross-Harris at Blenheim Forge to ask if I can visit him in Peckham, he replies immediately. He’s happy to have visitors – and it’s just as well. People often call by to get their knives sharpened and, following a piece in the New York Times that named Blenheim a top London destination, intrepid American tourists sometimes swing by, too.
Blenheim Forge, which was founded in 2014, is under a Victorian railway arch, and it speaks to my roots (I’m apt to well up when in proximity to certain kinds of machinery). Like Loftus, Ross-Harris’s career was also a bit of accident. He and Jon Warshawsky used to spend their weekends knocking up DIY projects in the garden of their shared house in south London. One such project was a forge, made from fire bricks and a leaf blower, and it got them hooked.
Ross-Harris trained as a blacksmith, working under this very arch when it was leased by another business. He worked mostly on architectural projects, but in the evenings he experimented. “I wasn’t massively into knives before I made one. You realise how many elements there are: the different types of steel, the different profiles and geometries.” When his bosses decided to move site, he and Warshawsky bagged the arch for themselves (they were later joined by another friend, Richard Warner), and ever since, the business has grown and grown. Nowadays, it makes perfect financial sense for them to spend £40,000 on five tonnes of steel: they know they’ll use it.
What’s special about Blenheim Forge knives? The answer is: everything, from the steel that’s used (“it’s really, really clean”), to the handles (only native hardwoods), to the sharpening (each one is individually sharpened on a Japanese whetstone, and then stropped on leather). Chefs love them, and it’s not hard to see why. When Ross-Harris shows me some, my fingers tingle: a sudden covetousness. They cost hundreds of pounds, but I’m not young: these could see me out.
My eye falls on a gargantuan bread knife – every week, the forge’s bladesmiths set aside time to work on special projects – for which I long especially: no more wonky sourdough in my house. Most exciting of all, however, is the news that Blenheim is working with the only remaining drop forge in Sheffield – drop forging uses hydraulic pressure to press the metal, rather than a hammer – with a view to producing a range of steak knives. Uh oh. This is my dream. I remember the Victorian water-powered drop forge we used to visit on school trips. He promises to email me.
If you’re not in the market for a bespoke, handmade knife, there is, of course, a middle way. You could buy an expensive factory-made knife instead, one that’s highly functional and beautifully designed. “We use ice hardening for our knives,” says Corin Mellor, the designer who now runs his father’s business, David Mellor. “The heat treatment starts at 1,200 degrees [celsius], then it goes down to room temperature, and then the blades – they’re Japanese – are put into liquid nitrogen and cooled further. It makes the edge last a bit longer.”
Designing knives isn’t straightforward for him: his father’s celebrated cutlery designs are all still in production. But Corin’s black-handled kitchen knives, which took him four years to perfect, are now the among the company’s bestsellers. In appearance, he tells me, they nod deliberately to Sabatier’s classic design, but they’re also reassuringly sharp and have a certain balance in the hand: “They need to perform ergonomically. The forging runs down inside the resin handle, and then there’s a big lump of metal right at the bottom. You can’t see it – it’s inside the handle – but that’s the trick. It gives it a bit of weight.”
Perhaps you’re wondering what I’ve finally decided on after all these conversations. But the truth is, I’m not there just yet. While I wait for the Blenheim Forge Sheffield knives, and perhaps for a bread knife, too, I’m slowly buying what’s useful and affordable. I’m loyal to David Mellor, another son of Sheffield, and have already treated myself to two of Corin’s knives, with their elegant single rivet and their shape that reminds me of my mother’s best gun-handled silver cutlery: one is a cook’s knife, the other is a chopping knife, and I love them (I paid just over £100 for both). For speed, and because they’re cheery – their handles are orange and yellow – I’ve also bought some affordable Victorinox paring knives, which are great for peeling fruit and other things, and can go in the dishwasher.
No doubt more will arrive soon; my fingers still tingle, and not because I’ve had an accident while boning a chicken. But, in the meantime, I know now that Loftus was right: it’s so good to have knives that are properly sharp. When I leave my desk at the end of the day, a new ease accompanies me as I head to the kitchen. What can I dice tonight, and how finely?
