We are a small coppice crafts business making beautiful traditional and contemporary products.
We are now based in the Chiltern Hills in South Oxfordshire. But we travel regularly to the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire where we were established for 20 years. We continue to undertake commissions and supply products to both areas and further a field.
We make all of our products ourselves from locally coppiced materials. We specialise in creating sustainable garden products, bent stick furniture and continuously woven hurdles. We also make a wide variety of turned, carved, woven and whittled products. If there is something in particular you would like to commission please let us know. If it’s made from sticks we’ll have a go – probably!
History
Dave started his career in coppice crafts in 1998 when looking for a new direction in life. He started volunteering for a conservation charity as a volunteer officer, and being responsible for a group of volunteers he received coppicing and hedgelaying training in return. In 1999 he started the business Wildwood Coppice Crafts. Soon after he was asked by a local special needs school if he would start a weekly woodland craft day for a regular group of kids. 5 years later this had become almost a full time job, teaching basic greenwood and woodland craft qualifications to students from 4 different PRU units. The teaching was a fantastic accelerated form of learning, as anything he wanted to learn how to make, he could make with the kids.
Dave left teaching around 2005 and focused on the making of coppice products and running courses for adults. A couple of years later he obtained funding from the Malvern Hills AONB to set up the Malvern Hills Coppice Network. This put him under the radar of the Small Woods Association who were looking for placements for Coppice Apprentices. Dave hosted an apprentice for 3 years which helped his business develop further.
There were now moves nationally for the reformation of a national coppice organisation. As chair of the Malvern Hills Coppice Network, Dave was asked to sit on the steering committee for the formation of a new national body. In 2013 the new National Coppice Federation was born and Dave organised it’s inaugural meeting in the Malvern Hills in April of that year.
Dave served as a founding NCFed Director for Worcestershire for 3 years with responsibility for developing the website.
After 19 years in the Malvern Hills, Dave upped sticks and moved his business to The Chiltern Hills in 2018 and relaunched the business under the name of The Stick Smith.