Jessie Watson Brown
Natural Leather & Hide Tanning
Jessie Watson Brown‘s tannery is dedicated to natural tanning and traditional techniques:
“The tanning processes I practice use only natural ingredients – locally harvested tree barks such as oak and spruce, and softened with oils.
I tan and sell leather and rawhide as well as unique leather handcrafts. We also intend to demystify the art of tanning by teaching courses, using simple methods and tools. This is how I was taught and how we still practise.” Jessie learnt tanning in Washington State in America and more recently from traditional tanners in Scandinavia. She practices on a farm on Dartmoor, and has recently taken on an apprentice, Oli. Due to the scale of her setup she is able to work on smaller hides and unusual commissions. The day I visit she is working on mink hides that had been sent in by an East Anglian conservation programme.
“I love the discovery of learning how different skins and processes work and seeing the alchemical change that they go through during the tanning process. I would love to see tanning become normal in people’s homesteads, as it once would have been.
I mostly tan wild deer skins - most of which would be disposed of by burning, while the majority of the UK's domestic animal skins get exported to other countries or tanned in chemically intensive commercial tanneries.”
Find out more about the heritage craft of natural leather tanning on our Bloomberg Connects guide!
