Join Devonian thatcher Tom Allan as he discusses his book On the Roof, a Financial Times Book of the Year in 2024, and his path to becoming a thatcher.
Tom Allan has worked as a thatcher in South Devon since 2012. Before this he planted hedges in the Scottish Borders and worked for a London publishing house. He writes about the natural world for the Guardian‘s Country Diary column, and has written on travel and the environment for the Financial Times, Guardian, the Earth Island Journal, British Wildlife Magazine, and others.
About On the Roof
Thatched roofs are like living organisms: each one a web of repair, replacement and alteration, shaped, dressed and re-moulded by every pair of hands that works on it.
Thatching is one of the world’s oldest crafts – an ancient trade that roots us in nature, as Tom Allan discovered when he quit an office job to become an apprentice in Devon. Now a master of the trade, in On the Roof he goes in search of its history and future, meeting fellow thatchers, from the son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune grass in the Hebrides, to a Syrian refugee who found peace among the seagrass roofs of Denmark, to one of the first women to master Japan’s 5,000-year-old thatching tradition.
Eye-opening, beautifully told and revealing a tradition hand-shaped over centuries, On the Roof is a story of how we live with the land and how we have chosen to treat it.