Jay Blades

Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden

Welcome to Season 2 of Circular with Katie Treggiden. We’re kicking things off with Jay Blades, a modern furniture restorer, upcycler and eco designer who is passionate about sustainability and community. In this episode we discuss his history with furniture restoration, the importance of investing in the next generation of creators, why helping people you may never meet truly matters and lots more.

Jay Blades is now best known for presenting the BBC’s Money for Nothing, The Repair Shop and most recently Jay and Dom's Home Fix. I’ve known Jay for a long time, so it was lovely to catch up with him for a proper conversation about a subject that is so close to both of our hearts.

We discuss:

- His earliest memory of repairing things.

- His former non-profit Out of the Dark and teaching young people to repair and restore old furniture.

- The reason future proofing is so important.

- The end of his marriage, his experience with homelessness and how he came back from it all.

- His experience of The Repair Shop and meeting Mary Berry
… and more!

Here are some highlights.

How ‘Out of the Dark’ Came To Be.

“My ex-wife Jade and I were running the charity called ‘Street Dreams’ which was basically about getting young people away from crime, so it was a fresh approach to old problems. The council, police, social services, fire services would come to us and say, ‘we've got a hot spot area where young people are committing crime and we need you to go in there and sort it out.’ Funding started drying up and we needed to continue working with those young people. One of the things that we operated when we started running all these charities, it was a case of working yourself out of a job which basically means that you work with a group of young people who are disengaged, then they become engaged and where do they go with all that energy? Then we employ them, and then they start to become the new youth leaders. So,as we wanted to continue with these young people, Jade came up with the wonderful idea of restoring old furniture.”

“About 50% of them have gone into restoration or furthering their education. They’ve gone on to upholstery, restoration, project management, interior design and things like that. A lot of them have just gone on to normal jobs. I think with the group of young people who used to have them just getting out of bed was a bonus, them not smoking or doing some low-level crime is a winner.”

Why investing in Young People through Restoration Matters.

“One of the things that I love about restoration is it brings so many elements for people who have been put on, let’s say the scrap-heap. If you go into the educational system, if you don’t get the A star plus or you don't get the grades, you're really gonna amount to nothing, is kind of what they're saying to you. If you get the A-star, you’re going to college or university, have 2.5 kids and live happily ever after, you've got a brilliant job. Whereas the way that I look at things, I look at sustainability as a whole. Some people look at it as: you've got to separate your plastics from your paper and your glass and this and that. Sustainability includes people and these young people need to have something put into them that allows them to see themselves as sustainable and as a valued member of society, so that’s what it was all about.”

Why Future Proofing is so Important.

“I think people and the planet are very important to me, especially when it comes to community work. I worked in the community sector and really there is no profit in the work, you're doing it for the love, and you're kind of doing it for people you're never gonna see. So I have this kind of way of functioning now. I'm here on this planet to influence people I'm never gonna meet, and that means that I have to leave a legacy, create something that can be taken over by someone else or re-designed by someone else, and then they would say, ‘Well, I kind of got that idea from that person, but this is what I've done with the idea. And that to me is what future-proofing is all about. Let's make sure that the future is bright for people who are not here yet, because if we continue the way that we're continuing on this planet, we're not gonna leave them a pretty problem. It's gonna be quite messy.”

Learn more & connect with Jay here

Check out Jay’s book ‘Making It’ here

About Katie Treggiden

Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author, podcaster and keynote speaker championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine, Design Milk and Monocle24. Following research during her recent Masters at the University of Oxford, she is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and this podcast.

You can find Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1, sign up for her e-newsletter here and if you’re a designer-maker interested in becoming more sustainable, sign up for her free Facebook Group here. If you’d like to support more fantastic content like this, you can buy Katie a ‘virtual coffee’ here in exchange for behind-the-scenes content and a shout-out in Season Three.