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We are a nation of builders. Not of houses, but of almost everything else: model railways, crocheted fruit bowls, vast sculptures made of crushed cans and doll houses with loft conversions.
On Thursday, I stood in an abandoned department store in Croydon and marvelled at these homespun treasures and approximately 14,000 more on the first day of Hetain Patel’s exhibition Come As You Really Are. The artist has created a two-storey “hobby cave”: a shrine to the country’s proud amateurs, where intricate wood carvings and a teacher’s used-rubber collection are given equal weighting.
It felt, horrible phrase, “very British”. It’s not that passionate hobbyists don’t exist everywhere — as anyone who has had the pleasure of an American state fair will know. Rather it is that Artangel, the organisers, chose to lavish such resources on an exhibition that celebrates them all equally, with no competitive element and little quality control.
Writing in the FT two years ago, Rosa Lyster defined hobbies as things that “can be mastered but are resistant to professionalisation”, which is perhaps why we love them so. In the UK, it has never been the done thing to care too much about the job that earns you money and weird hobbies are proud proof of this national disdain. It’s the same reason we celebrate eccentric aristocrats and why City workers still love the notion, if not the practice, of a boozy midweek lunch.
But the productive impulse is increasingly hard to resist. When I started reading more about the hobby cave exhibitors, I was struck by how many were in fact finding ways to professionalise the supposedly un-professionalisable. The woman who makes weird soaps also sells them; the one who throws pots no bigger than your thumbnail hosts workshops teaching you to do the same.
If you have a hobby, ask yourself: who are you currently learning it from? Most likely it’s not a local meet-up, but the social media account or book of someone who started out as a hobbyist, got very good at it and now monetises their skill through ads, partnerships or direct sales to a geographically dispersed band of fellow travellers.
This can be liberating. Just last week a friend quit a job in corporate law that was making her miserable to spend at least the next six months improving her Star Wars costuming skills. Maybe her hobby will remain just that, but she’s got a good online following and part of her hopes it will become more.
But isn’t the joy of a hobby that it’s the opposite of work, not a part of it? I messaged Phin Harper, a hobby mobile maker (the ones for hanging, not phoning) whom I attended a workshop with last year and whose Instagram feed is peppered with increasingly professional-looking commissions. Harper told me that the pressure to turn hobbies into “economically productive microbusinesses” was unwelcome but huge, particularly for people whose wages hadn’t kept pace with the increasingly high cost of living.
Happily, I have a solution that will keep your hobby safe from side hustle-ification. I am what is known as a serial hobbyist. We are a fickle clan for whom the thrill lies in the steep learning curve and quick progress you make at the start of something — what weightlifters call “noob gains”.
Noob gains are the reason I’ve taken up, enjoyed and then abandoned: knitting (ditched at the point of being able to make hats), pottery (a bowl), felting (a tiny pig), woodwork (a cold frame for the allotment, which I suppose you could also call a hobby), mobile making and many more.
Like the fugitive who never sleeps in the same bed twice, you can protect your hobby by committing to relentless amateurism, secure in the knowledge that you are unlikely to make anything good enough to give at Christmas, let alone impress a stranger.
harriet.fitchlittle@ft.com
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