Our Leather

The items we sell are some of the very few in this country that can be fully traced from the field to your home and I’d like to tell you how. By purchasing one of our bags, you can not only help a small farm in the Lake District reduce the amount of waste in their beef production, but you also work with us in supporting a small and special leather industry that still remains in the UK. Here’s how:

The Farm
Gowbarrow Hall Farm is located in the Lake District, on the shores of Ullswater. We are Pasture for Life and Organic certified. We manage our cattle using regenerative methods, and their presence on the land is helping to restore our habitats and improve our precious ecosystem. This leather is made using a hide from one of our cattle which was butchered for beef. We collect the hide direct from the abattoir and salt it so it is preserved as well as stamp it with our initials so we are sure that it is our hide that is returned to us. If we had not collected the hide to turn it into leather, it would have been classed as “trade waste” at the abattoir, and they would need to have to pay to take the hide away.

The Tannery
Once the hide is salted it is ready to be transported to the tannery. The tannery we use is located in Bristol. It is one of the few remaining tanneries in the UK and practices vegetable tanning, which is a traditional and more environmentally sensitive approach to tanning, as opposed to chrome, which is the typical practice for commercial scale tanning and can have a negative environmental impact. Choosing to use vegetable tanning also ensures that the final product is still a natural material that ultimately could be returned to the earth at the end of it’s hopefully long life. You will notice that the leather has a wonderful smell, which is only achieved when we use vegetable tanning.

The Finishers
Once the hide has been tanned, it then goes to the finishers based in Northamptonshire. Here the leather is dyed and finished to the required thickness and suppleness that is needed to make this bag as soft and beautiful as you see it today.

Becoming a Bag
The design of the bag is by Leather Needle Thread. From the finishers, the leather is sent to Esther to cut the hide into component parts according to her designs. She then sends the leather back to Gowbarrow for us to compile them into the bag that is now with you.

British Pasture Leather
This whole process would not be possible without the wonderful help of British Pasture Leather, which produces leather that is traceable to regenerative farms in the UK. It is the only leather business that is Pasture for Life certified and supplies artisans and brands making leather goods, giving them the ability to choose leather which originates in practices that increase the health of animals, soil, ecosystems, and communities. British Pasture Leather do this by organising and coordinating every step from raw hide to finished leather, with all production entirely in Britain (whereas most leather comes from highly globalised systems).