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Inside Britain's Last Pencil Factory
In a Cumbrian valley, a few dozen people still make, by hand and machine, the humblest tool of thought.
Listen · 11 min
The smell hits you first: cedar, warm and resinous, the scent of every pencil case you ever owned. The factory has stood here since graphite was dug from the fells above, and it makes, still, the instrument that nearly every idea in history was first written with.
The closer we looked, the less certain the easy conclusions became — which is usually the sign that a thing is worth the looking.
The remainder of the piece is below.
