What changed.
A living atlas should be able to show you it is alive. Everything that arrived, and everything that was taken out, with the date and the reason.
7 of the entries below are removals. Any list can grow. A list that loses things is a list somebody is reading.
- New places
Eight more ways into hands-on work in New York
Barbers can compare the initial programs at American Barber Institute, Tribeca Barber & Beauty School in Queens, and ARROJO Academy in Manhattan. Hairdressers gain the DUMBO course at Aveda Arts & Sciences Institute New York, Brittany Beauty Academy's Bronx program, and ARROJO Academy's cosmetology course. Both New York pages now hold four places each. Brooklyn Workforce Innovations adds free Brooklyn Woods training for eligible New Yorkers with some hands-on experience who want to enter cabinet and fabrication work. Carpenters gain the local union apprenticeship route, beginning with an information session and competitive selection. Each listing explains its practical training and entry conditions without promising a licence or a job.
- Taken out
Two unavailable classes retired, one cheese calendar repaired
Editions Studio's bookbinding class page returns 404, and its home page says the Seattle studio is on pause. Cozymeal's online hand-pulled noodle class returns 410 and says the page is no longer available. Both listings were removed after reading the live pages. GREYS Fine Cheeses still offers Nashville tastings, but its old events page is gone. The listing now links to the Nashville booking calendar, and its old fixed weekday claim has been replaced with a prompt to check that calendar.
- New places
Eight more ways to learn the work in New York
Florists gain the professional program at FlowerSchool NY, the New York Botanical Garden's certificate with internship and portfolio, and the four- and six-day courses at New York School of Flower Design. Cooks can compare the Manhattan diploma at the Institute of Culinary Education, Kingsborough Community College's degree and certificate, and Hot Bread Kitchen's First Course NYC route into paid restaurant apprenticeships for eligible New Yorkers. Bakers gain the Institute of Culinary Education's pastry and baking diploma. Adult tap dancers can explore Broadway Dance Center's structured training, which welcomes beginners while recommending two years of studio experience. The New York florist, line cook and tap dancer pages now each hold four places.
- New places
Five more ways into the work in New York
A cellist can now find NYU Steinhardt's string performance degree. Young tap dancers can follow the pre-professional track at Steps on Broadway. The ReThread Project offers paid costume shop apprenticeships that can include millinery. Calligraphers gain a ten-week course at Cooper Union and a local guild that welcomes beginners and lists working members for clients. The New York cellist and calligrapher pages now each hold four places.
- Taken out
Three links that no longer lead readers to a class or apprenticeship
The dated Ballymaloe Breads with Darina Allen class has passed and its page now returns an error. The American Culinary Federation's apprenticeship page is unavailable while the federation reports a website outage. The San Francisco School of Needlework and Design's class page is gone, and the domain's home page now contains casino links. All three listings were removed. They can return only when a real, relevant page is available again.
- The site itself
A first step, a notebook, and the people behind the work
Find a craft through a few simple choices, read practical guidance from the studios, and follow the steps from a first visit to further learning. A notebook keeps your saved crafts, places and private reflections on your device. Share selected places with a friend. The People page begins with two glass artists in Seattle, linking to their own accounts and films. Aymeric, the person behind Humankept, now has a place here too.
Find your first craft →Your notebook →Meet the people →A note from Aymeric →
- New places
London, where three crafts had one place each and now have four
The London page could tell you a potter, a florist and a cobbler existed in the city, and it could name exactly one place for each. All three now offer four. Potters get the four Turning Earth studios in Hoxton, Leyton, Highgate and Camden, the eight to twelve week courses at The Kiln Rooms in Peckham, and the ceramic design degree at Central Saint Martins. Florists get the workshops at Moyses Stevens inside Battersea Power Station, the Covent Garden studio of The London Flower Academy, and the two year floristry apprenticeship at Capel Manor College, which is a job with a qualification attached rather than a course. Cobblers get three days at the bench at I Can Make Shoes in Bethnal Green, the complete shoemaking short course in the London College of Fashion footwear studios, and the list of degrees, diplomas and apprenticeships kept by the Cordwainers, the City livery company that has stood behind the trade since 1272. The greengrocer gains the first way into that work the London page has ever had: the jobs board of New Covent Garden Market, where the wholesalers on the market floor advertise. Four places were read and refused, including a flower school in London with no address anywhere on its site and a beeswax candle workshop that calls itself London and is held in Surrey.
- New craft
The cabinetmaker joins the atlas
The atlas had carpenters, woodcarvers and woodturners, and nowhere for the trade that builds the furniture itself, to joints cut so true they need no screw. It arrives with eight places in three cities. In Paris, two ways in to the state qualification, one at École Boulle for adults and one by apprenticeship at the furniture trades school on boulevard Voltaire, and a weekly class in the city's own ateliers. In London, a two year diploma at The Building Crafts College in Stratford, an evening course in Hackney, tasters in Camden and a council course on Saturdays in Hammersmith. One listing moved rather than arrived: the Montreal school of art cabinetmaking had been filed under carpenter because there was nowhere truer to put it. The photograph is a real one, a woman working over a carved cabinet with timber stacked to the roof behind her.
- New places
Paris, from no craft deep enough to six
A morning ago no craft in Paris had more than two places a reader could go. Six now have four: pastry, bread, embroidery, bookbinding, gilding and printmaking. Four of them gained both an hour you can book and a way into the trade, from a macaron class in Montmartre and a baguette class by the Seine to the CAP qualifications taught to adults at the lycées of the fashion and book trades. New York took four more crafts to four: letterpress at the Center for Book Arts, stand-up at the Manhattan Comedy School, flamenco on the Upper West Side and in Midtown, and illustration at SVA and FIT. Across the atlas, with the cabinetmaker in London, that is eighteen craft and city pairs deep enough to stand on their own, up from seven. Two older links now land closer to what they promise: the Casco Bay mailboat run on its own page with times and fares, and the Dublin hawk walk on the page where it is booked. Every link in the atlas was checked the same morning, and none was dead.
- The site itself
Every city now knows which country it is in
Twice in one day a city page turned out to be counting somewhere else, so the way a city recognises itself was rebuilt rather than patched again. A city used to be one regular expression over a line of free text, which is why London would have claimed London, Ontario the day anyone added it. A city is now three things: how a listing writes its name, the state or country it sits in, and the handful of cases shape alone cannot settle. The rule is that a location has to name the city and then either name its region or name no region at all, so Paris, Texas and Melbourne, Florida and Vancouver, Washington land nowhere, while Shoreditch and Le Marais and Nihonbashi still land where they should. Nothing moved: all thirty three cities hold exactly the listings they held this morning. Two things that were quietly missing now work, a listing written Washington DC without its comma and one written Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Eighty three cases are written down as a test, because the reason Corning was counted for months is that nothing existed to say it should not be.
- The site itself
The other thirty two cities, checked for the same mistake
Having found New York counting Corning, the obvious question was which other city was doing it. None, as it turns out: every listing on every city page is genuinely in or beside the city that claims it. But the tests themselves were fragile, and three would have gone wrong on the next listing rather than this one. Los Angeles accepted a bare LA, which is also the postal abbreviation for Louisiana, so Eunice would have landed in California; the nine listings that said LA now say Los Angeles and the abbreviation is not matched at all. Minneapolis accepted any St. Paul, including the cathedral in London. Dublin accepted any Smithfield, including the London meat market, and Cork accepted Cork Street, where the London galleries are. All four are fixed. Seventeen more matchers would still accept Paris, Texas or Melbourne, Florida if anyone added one, so a report now prints where every listing lands and flags anything naming a state or country its city does not live in. It runs before shipping, with the link gate.
- Taken out
New York was counting Corning, and Corning is 250 miles away
The city page matched any listing whose location said New York, and New York is a large state. The Corning Museum of Glass, four hours up the line, was being offered to a reader looking for an afternoon in the city, along with a cello class in Rochester, a pizza academy in Valley Cottage, a state wide archivist service and two courses that happen online. Seven listings left the New York page. None left the atlas: every one of them is still on its craft page, where it was always true. The same fix found the Bronx Zoo, which said Bronx, NY and had therefore never counted as New York at all. The city now reads 111 places rather than 117, and the four crafts announced above as deep enough are three: the cellist was only deep because Rochester was standing in the city.
- New places
New York could show you the work and never say how to start it
The deepest city on the atlas held 104 listings and exactly three ways into a trade. A reader could watch opera sung, glass flamed and pizza turned, and find nothing telling them how a person in that city begins. Thirteen doors now do: the union local that holds a working cellist's contracts, a four year paid glazier apprenticeship in Long Island City, a licensed bench jewelry school in midtown teaching since 1979, ten free weeks at the torch in Brooklyn, a year with the Manhattan presses and a stipend, two conservatories, two ballet auditions, the house team submissions that are how stage time in New York actually starts, and a pizzaiolo course taught one student at a time in a working Staten Island restaurant. Jeweler, cellist, opera singer and ballet dancer now have four listings each in New York, enough to choose between.
- The site itself
A Tokyo ikebana teacher put her own name on the door
The weekly checker flagged atelier-soka.com as no longer naming Atelier Soka, which is exactly what a domain that changed hands looks like. It had not changed hands. The teacher now presents the studio under her own name, Mika Otani, on the same domain, with the same ikebana class, and the old name survives only in the file paths. The listing was renamed rather than removed. Two other links moved the same week: a Cambridge cheese class was retired and its successor put in, mozzarella now joined by burrata and stracciatella, and a Northern Irish evening class in brickwork came out, because the college stopped running it and nothing on their site answers to brickwork any more.
- New places
Paris finally says how to get into the trade
Paris held twenty places and every one of them was an afternoon: a class, a workshop, an hour at a bench. Not one told a reader how to enter the craft, which is half of this atlas missing in a city that trains these trades better than almost anywhere. Seven ways in now sit beside them, at the schools that actually teach them: binding and engraving at Estienne, gilding and turning at Boulle, the adult baker's certificate and pastry retraining at FERRANDI, and the specialisation level at Lesage.
- New places
Four London crafts you can now compare, not just confirm
Until this week the atlas could tell you a printmaker exists in London and not where to go and learn it: every craft in the city had one or two listings and no more. Printmaking, tailoring, illustration and magic now have four each, which is enough to choose between. An artist run studio in Mile End and the presses at Woolwich, five months on Savile Row and a sewing school on Essex Road, the illustration centre that opened in Clerkenwell in June and twenty courses in Covent Garden, a magic shop that has been on the same street for sixty years and a table where the magicians work inches from your hands.
- The site itself
One organisation, counted three times
A New York institution was in the atlas as 92nd Street Y, as 92nd Street Y (92NY), and as 92NY. Three entries, one place. Comparing names catches some of that and misses that one entirely, so we grouped by website instead: sixteen addresses turned out to carry more than one name. Twelve were the same organisation and now read the way each one names itself. Four were not duplicates at all, and stay as they are. No listing was removed.
- Taken out
A Cambridge sewing shop is rebuilding its classes
Both listings for gather here came out. The shop is alive and still teaches, but its own site says the class schedule is being rebuilt and the class pages are unpublished. One of the two was invisible to the weekly checker: the link answered normally and then sent a real reader onward by script to a page with no class on it. It will come back when the schedule does.
- The site itself
Every craft page now says what it is for
The pages were titled with a bare craft name, which told a search engine nothing about what was on them. They now lead with the question they answer, and the ten crafts you visit rather than train for are written by hand.
- New places
Eleven ways into Japanese craft
Indigo dyeing, knife forging, washi paper and more, in Kyoto and Tokyo. Two of them are doors to actual work rather than an afternoon.
- Taken out
Ozu Washi was never a bookbinder
A Tokyo paper house had been filed under bookbinding. It makes and sells washi, which is a different craft, so the listing came out. Tokyo still has no bookbinder on the atlas, and saying so is better than filling the gap with the nearest thing.
- New places
Seven Paris workshops
The crafts the city is actually known for, each one a real room with a real teacher in it.
- Taken out
Two listed domains had quietly changed hands
A sculpture school and a professional body, both long-standing links, had become casino affiliate pages built from the same template. Neither returned an error, so nothing flagged them. They are out, and the link checker now asks whether a page is still the organisation it claims to be.
- The site itself
The manifesto got its own page
It used to be a section you scrolled past on the way to somewhere else.
- The site itself
A way to see every city at once
The city pages existed but you had to know the address to reach one. They are now gathered in one index, grouped by part of the world.
- New city
Ireland, six crafts and two cities
Dublin and Cork joined the atlas, with the cooper, the maltster, the lace maker and three more. Two further crafts were researched and held back: one had no honest photograph, the other had none that showed the craft rather than the crowd.
- The site itself
The city you pick now follows you
Choosing Cork and then being shown a workshop in Portland made the filter pointless. Your choice now carries onto the craft page.
- Taken out
Three classes that no longer existed
A retailer's cookery classes were still linked from three crafts. The pages loaded, the classes were gone. Alive is not the same as true.
Something here that shouldn't be, or somewhere that should? Tell us.