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A new national award seeking ingenious ideas that combine heritage craft wisdom with advanced technology to forge a dynamic and rooted new vision for Britain. £60,000 prize pot fully funded.

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What is The British Cræft Prize?

• The British Cræft Prize is a new national prize launching in March 2026. We are looking for maverick and misfit makers, designers, engineers, and innovators to forge something ingenious — work to benefit Britain and the wider world.
• The twist? This is no ordinary design or innovation competition. We are searching for innovative responses to today’s biggest challenges, inviting innovators to draw on the deep wisdom embedded in the heritage crafts of the past and combine it with the cutting-edge technologies of the future.
• Competing for a prize pot of £60,000+, the competition is designed to inspire a wave of creativity and innovation. It is open to all the merrie people of Britain, by birth or adoption.

Why it exists

• The British Cræft Prize is the brainchild of Nation of Artisans — a project founded in 2025 to explore British identity through the lens of craft and industry (“what Britain makes, and what makes Britain”).
• Britain is a land of deep craft and creative heritage. It is also a pioneer of some of the world’s most important industrial and technological innovations.
• Yet these two traditions have drifted apart. Britain’s craft world is rooted but increasingly fragile, often trapped trying to conserve a way of life whose material foundations have already vanished. Meanwhile, our techno-innovation industries are revolutionary but lacking in soul and meaning, often dissolving the communities and traditions that once enabled harmony and flourishing.
• The British Cræft Prize exists not to preserve ashes, but to light a new fire. It incubates radical, practical creations that prove heritage and innovation can be dynamic partners. By combining craft knowledge with emerging technology, the prize aims to address Britain’s identity and innovation crisis through a new mode of AI: artisanal intelligence.

On “Cræft” & Technology

• “Craft” is a word that invites argument. Is it only handmade? Is it opposed to technology and industry? In popular usage it often collapses into twee imagery: Etsy sellers and nostalgic handicraft. While we value human-scale making, the Cræft Prize is aimed at something more ambitious.
• The name draws on the Anglo-Saxon word “cræft”. Popularised by 9th-century King Alfred, cræft is not just manual skill, but the virtuous application of knowledge and power to produce excellence in a way that binds hand, eye, heart, mind, material, place, and history into a coherent practice — the term was revived by historian Alexander Langlands in his 2018 book Cræft.
• Thus, the prize is avowedly pro-technology, but against slop. At its best, technology is about doing more with less, a principle long shared by craft, engineering, and invention. Following Josiah Wedgwood, we see technology not as an enemy of craft, but as a tool for extending it: enabling human flourishing through work that unites utility, beauty, and scale.

What we want to see

• We are seeking ingenious applications of the fusion between heritage craft and innovative technology. We are casting our net widely because true innovation affects both the object and the method of its creation.
• Britain’s heritage has always been defined by this dual ambition:
  • Sheffield makes cutlery and perfected the crucible steel process.
  • Northamptonshire mastered shoemaking and scaled Goodyear welting.
  • Stoke-on-Trent makes ceramics and invented the bone china process.
• Entries should demonstrate this spirit of “future heritage” in one of two ways:
  1. A Product: An artefact that brings together craft and technology to solve a specific challenge.
  2. A Method: A deep redesign of a process or supply chain. One might design a new way of making, joining, or sourcing that combines material wisdom with cutting-edge tools — ideally illustrated through the creation of a physical prototype.
• Ultimately, we want innovations that use advanced technology to extend deep craft traditions into practical applications such as: Not Quite Past applying generative AI to ceramics design; Petit Pli using origami principles and advanced materials to create clothing that grows with children; WikiHouse reviving ancient timber joinery through CNC-milled construction; and Zaha Hadid Architects fusing 3D printing with voussoir masonry techniques to build un-reinforced bridges. We want to see more things like this.

Eligibility & Britain