The main article in this first issue, a profile of Robert Welch, one of the outstanding silversmiths and industrial designers of the late 20th century, offers a convenient peg on which to hang a few nostalgic thoughts. In the book he wrote as a record of his life's work, Hand & Machine, he underlined the belief he had held since student days at the RCA that it was perfectly possible to co-exist with the two traditions of manufacture and to maintain the highest standards of craftsmanship in doing so. His work gave ample support to his belief. And, in a nutshell, that is the belief to which this cyberspace journal is dedicated.

Why a new magazine? And why on-line?

a common heritage, and who engage in the same struggle for survival. The internet might have been created to cater for just such a vast and geographically dispersed public. The need and the facility go hand in hand. For this writer, the journey has gone full circle. Thirty years ago I was asked by a London publishing house if I thought I could resurrect one of the proudest craft journals of Victorian England, the Pottery Gazette. Its last issue, published early in 1970, lay beneath a heap of rubble in a basement office, ironically in London's John Adam Street, surrounded by mountains of unopened mail from the world's ceramics, glass and cutlery factories. Invitations to the inauguration of this and the opening of that were hidden beneath heaps of dust, grime and emptied ash trays. And century-old volumes of that monthly mouthpiece of the likes of Wedgwood, Spode and Minton, Meissen and Sevres, of Saxony, Staffordshire, Limoges, Copenhagen, Bavaria, Naples and Madrid; of Daume and Baccarat, Bohemia and Waterford, gathered a thick overcoat of dust.