"After 47 years, my landlord is taking the building back" — Margaret (70) is letting the last of her stained-glass songbird trios go before her Cumbria workshop closes for good at the end of August.

Margaret Ainsworth (70) in her Cumbria workshop. After 47 years, she is packing away the cutters, the lead came and the cathedral glass for the last time.

Cumbria, May. The little workshop sits at the end of a stone lane in the Eden Valley, behind a converted blacksmith's forge. Inside, it smells of warm solder, beeswax polish and old paper. There are pencil sketches of robins and wrens pinned to every beam. On the long oak bench under the south window, three small birds catch the morning light — orange, turquoise, scarlet — perched together on a hand-bent copper branch.

Margaret Ainsworth bends over them with a soft cloth, the way she has done since 1979.

"The lease ends on the last day of August," she says, without looking up. "Forty-seven years I've been in this room. The landlord's son wants the building back for storage. He's well within his rights — I knew this day would come. But you don't really expect it, do you, until the letter arrives." She has been told there are perhaps a hundred and twenty completed pieces left on the shelves. She has decided not to start any more.

A forty-seven-year quiet life behind one south-facing window

Margaret came to Kendal from Lancaster in the autumn of 1978, twenty-two years old, with a small inheritance from her grandmother and a job offer at a church-glass restorer that fell through in her first week. She rented the back room of the old forge for nine pounds a week and taught herself to cut, lead and solder from a single book by a man named Henry Wynne.

The back room of the old forge in the Eden Valley. Every trio has been built here for 47 years.

"Stained glass was a man's trade then," she says. "Even the suppliers wouldn't sell to me directly — I had to put my orders in under a friend's name for the first three years. I didn't mind. I had the window, I had the bench, and I had nothing else to do but practise." She made church-restoration panels for a decade. Then, in the late 1980s, a customer asked her if she could make a small standing bird — a robin — for her mother's mantelpiece. Margaret cut forty-one pieces of cathedral glass by hand and soldered them onto a thin copper branch. The customer cried when she collected it. That was the first songbird. She has, by her count, made just over four thousand of them since.

What's been happening to traditional British craft

It is not only Margaret who is closing her doors this year.

According to the Heritage Crafts Association's 2025 Red List of Endangered Crafts, traditional stained-glass work has been re-classified from "currently viable" to "endangered" in the United Kingdom. The number of working full-time stained-glass artists has fallen from over 2,400 in 1995 to fewer than 380 today — a decline of more than 84% in three decades. The British Society of Master Glass Painters reports that the average age of a working stained-glass artist in the UK is now 64, and that only 9% of practising artists are under 45. Of the 17 specialist art-glass training programmes that existed in the British art schools in 1990, only 4 remain.

The reason is not lack of demand. The reason, says Margaret, is that the apprenticeship simply cannot be done in a weekend course. "You need three years before you can cut a curve cleanly. Five before your lead-lines stop wandering. Ten before you stop ruining one piece in three. We don't have the patience for ten years anymore. We want something nice for the windowsill by Friday."

"I tried teaching, I tried apprentices, I even tried YouTube"

Margaret did not want her trade to die with her. Over the years, she has tried, in her own quiet way, to pass it on.

She took on three apprentices between 2003 and 2014. The first stayed eight months. The second, fourteen. The third — a young man from Penrith she had real hopes for — stayed almost two years before he left to take a salaried job at a kitchen showroom. "I understood entirely," she says. "I couldn't pay him what the kitchen showroom could. Craft doesn't pay what it used to."

She tried evening classes at the Kendal Adult Education Centre for a winter. Five students enrolled. Two finished the term. In 2019, her great-niece set up a YouTube channel for her and uploaded a series of seventeen short tutorials on lead-soldering and copper-foil technique. They have, between them, just under two thousand views.

"I think I'm the wrong sort of teacher for the internet," Margaret says, smiling for the first time. "I take too long to get to the point."

What most people don't realise about the glass itself

There is a quiet detail behind the songbird trio that even most of Margaret's regular customers don't know.

"What most people don't realise," she says, holding one of the orange-breasted birds up to the south window, "is that the glass itself is the problem. Not the work. The glass."

"This proper, deep, light-catching colour — it comes from what they call cathedral glass."

"The colour you're seeing here — this proper, deep, light-catching colour — comes from what they call cathedral glass. It's hand-rolled. It's mouth-blown in some cases. The pigments are metal-oxides fired into the sheet at twelve hundred degrees. It's been made the same way since the cathedral builders in the twelfth century, more or less."

She pauses. "There are now three glassworks left in the world that still make it properly. One in Germany — Lamberts of Waldsassen. One in France — Saint-Just, down near Lyon. One in the Pacific Northwest of America. That's it. Everything else you'll see sold as 'stained glass' in this country today is either machine-rolled commercial glass, or it's coloured film stuck onto a clear sheet. It looks similar in a photograph. It doesn't behave the same in actual sunlight."

The difference, she explains, is that hand-rolled cathedral glass contains tiny imperfections — bubbles, ripples, faint variations in thickness — that refract the light differently as the sun moves across the sky. "A machine-rolled piece sits there looking the same colour from breakfast until dusk. A hand-rolled piece is alive. It's deep blue in the morning. It turns turquoise by lunchtime. By teatime it's catching gold. That's what you're paying for. That's the only reason any of this is worth doing."

The Lamberts glass she has used since 1981 has more than doubled in trade price since 2019. Her last order, she says, was the most expensive one she's ever placed. It is also her final one.

How the songbird trio came together

The trio on her bench — three birds on a single bent-copper branch, mounted on a turned oak base — is the design she settled on in 2007 and has barely altered since. The orange-breasted bird on the left is a robin. The turquoise one in the middle is a kingfisher. The deep-scarlet bird on the right is a bullfinch. Three birds you might genuinely see in an English garden in the same hour on a still day in May.

The final batch on the workbench. Around 120 trios remain on the shelves.

Each individual bird is built from between 38 and 46 separate pieces of cathedral glass, cut by hand on a diamond wheel, ground smooth with a stone, foiled with thin copper, and joined with lead-tin solder along every seam. The branch is hand-bent from one continuous length of solid copper rod. The base is turned from English oak, rough-sawn at a small mill outside Penrith and finished with three coats of beeswax. A single trio takes Margaret between fourteen and seventeen hours, spread across four working days. She has roughly one hundred and twenty trios left. There will be no more after that.

What people who own one say about Margaret's songbird trio

"The right gift for the people you've already given everything to"

What makes Margaret's songbird trio meaningful as a gift, she thinks, is not the glass and is not the technique. It is the fact that the person receiving it has, in their hands, something that took four days of one woman's life to make.

"By the time you reach a certain age, the people you love already have everything they need," she says. "What they don't have is something that was actually made. Something where you can see — where you can feel — that a real person sat for hours and put it together. I think that's worth giving."

Each trio is wrapped by hand, in cream tissue, with a small note from Margaret.

She sets the trio back down on its turned oak base. The three birds catch the late-morning light through the south window and the orange breast of the robin glows for a moment like a small ember. "That's the only thing I've ever sold," she says. "Hours. The glass and the copper are practically free. It's the hours that cost."