Lucie Gledhill, off Cheshire Street

Lucie Gledhill’s studio is on the first floor above a launderette on a side street off Cheshire Street, in the corner of Bethnal Green where the market noise of Brick Lane has thinned to a single dog barking and a delivery van reversing. On a Tuesday morning in early March 2026, she lets me in via a side door and a flight of carpeted stairs that smell faintly of warm cotton. The studio is a single room, perhaps fifteen feet by ten, with a sash window looking onto a low brick wall.

She makes chain. This is, almost, the whole of what she does. She draws wire down to gauge, cuts it into rings on a mandrel, links the rings, solders each one closed, and continues. A finished necklace might contain four hundred links. Each link has been made by her, by hand, in this room.

I have come to watch.

The bench

The bench faces the window. It is a standard jeweller’s bench — angled work surface, leather catch-skin slung below to catch filings and dropped solder, a peg sticking out at the front to brace work against. There is a single anglepoise lamp clamped to the side. To the right, a flexible-shaft drill on a swing arm. To the left, a small pickle pot on a hot plate. Above the bench, a magnetic strip holding three jewellers’ files, a pair of cutters, two pairs of pliers and a steel rule.

That is the room.

There is a separate bench along the back wall for soldering, with three soldering blocks and two torches, and a kiln on a low shelf for annealing. There is no computer. There is no design wall. The work is held in her hands and in her eye, and the chain knows what it wants to be from the second link onward.

The draw plate

What separates a hand-drawn chain from a manufactured one is, in part, the draw plate. Gledhill’s hangs on a nail by the window — a flat steel plate the size of a paperback, drilled with a graduated series of round holes, each smaller than the last. Wire is annealed, pointed with a file, then pulled through successively smaller holes until it reaches the required gauge. Each pass work-hardens the wire and stretches it. The marks of the drawing — the very slight scoring, the patina of oil — are part of what the finished chain reads as.

“Manufactured chain has no memory,” she tells me, without looking up from the work. “Hand-made chain remembers everything.”

I think this is the kind of sentence makers say without thinking they are being quotable.

The pace

She works for a long stretch — perhaps forty minutes — without speaking. I sit on a low stool by the door and watch. The motion is small: pickup, position, pickup, solder, quench, pickup, position. The chain on her bench grows by about half an inch in the time I am watching. It is slow only by the standards of clocks. By the standards of the work itself it is the right speed.

There are commissions on the wall in a small pinned list, written in pencil. A bridal piece for a wedding in May. A repair of an inherited Edwardian curb chain. A commission for a private collector in Geneva that has been on the list since October. The lead times are months, not weeks.

I ask her how she knows when a piece is finished. She looks up and says — and I write this down — that the chain is finished when it falls. By which she means: when it hangs from your hand with the right weight and the right speed, not too slow and not too eager, settling into itself the way water finds level. You can feel it, she says. You don’t have to count.

I left a little after noon. The launderette on the ground floor was running a wash. Walking back to Bethnal Green station I thought about weight, and about how much of it could be carried by a chain so light I had barely felt it when she put it briefly across my open palm.