The Last Forge on Cotham Row
Priya Okonkwo-Hall has kept her forge lit six days a week for eleven years — and for the first time, apprentices are asking to learn.
The forge at 14 Cotham Row has been lit six days a week for eleven years, and Priya Okonkwo-Hall still gets there before the kettle is cold. "You lose the fire, you lose the morning," she says, already pumping the bellows. The shop makes horseshoes on contract and garden ironwork for anyone who asks — the ironwork pays the rent the horseshoes can't.
What's changed isn't the hammer work. It's who's watching it happen: a slow but real trickle of apprentices who found the trade through a video, not a family connection. "Five years ago nobody under thirty walked through that door," Okonkwo-Hall says. "Now I turn people away most months."
The shop takes on one apprentice at a time, unpaid for the first three months, a wage after that if both sides want to continue. It is, by her own admission, a terrible business model and the only one she trusts.
