THE LOST GRAMMAR OF MAINTENANCE — PART 1 OF 3 This is the first essay in a series about what we lost when we stopped maintaining things, and who profited from the loss. Part 1: Make Do and Mend (Loss) | Part 2: Right to Repair (Legal Response) | Part 3: The Disappearance of Domestic Science (Root Cause)
I. The Mushroom
It is a smooth dome of boxwood on a turned handle, about the size of a fist. You push it inside the sock, stretching the fabric taut over the curved surface. Then you weave. New thread across the hole, warp and weft, recreating the interlocking structure the loom made when the sock was new. The weave tells you where to work — you can see the broken threads, trace the grid, follow the pattern the fabric remembers even where it has failed. The tool assumes a relationship. The object speaks. The person listens. The mend is a conversation.
I bought one last month in an antiques shop in Sussex. The boxwood was beautiful — warm, dense, polished by decades of handling. While I was standing there, the woman behind the counter had to explain what it was to two separate customers. Both were under forty. Both picked it up, turned it over, put it down with the cautious embarrassment of someone handling an object from a world they were supposed to recognise but didn't.
Every household once had a darning mushroom. It was as ordinary as a wooden spoon. Some Victorian examples had handles that unscrewed to store needles inside — making the tool self-contained, requiring nothing but itself and a length of yarn to do its work.1 It appeared in the Board of Trade's Make Do and Mend pamphlet in 1943, alongside instructions for patching, re-cutting garments, re-soling shoes, moth protection, and laundering.2 The pamphlet assumed its readers could darn. It was teaching refinement, not basics. A pamphlet of specific, sensory instruction distributed nationwide by a government that took it for granted that its population was competent to maintain its own possessions.
The pamphlet sits in the Imperial War Museums collection now.3 You can buy a reprint in the gift shop. It has become a heritage object — charming, nostalgic, faintly quaint. But it was not written as heritage. It was written as infrastructure. The Board of Trade launched the Make Do and Mend campaign in autumn 1942 in conjunction with the Women's Group on Public Welfare, the Women's Institute, and the National Council of Social Services.2 Publicity materials featured a character called Mrs Sew and Sew. The campaign included pamphlets, films, posters, community classes. Clothes rationing had begun on 1 June 1941 and would continue until 15 March 1949 — eight years during which clothing coupons governed every garment, every repair, every moment of darning as a small act of civic participation.4
Nella Last, a housewife in Barrow-in-Furness, kept a Mass Observation diary from 1939 to 1966 — approximately twelve million words, one of the longest personal diaries in the English language.5 She documented it all: the patching, the conjuring of meals from frugal ingredients, the creation of new mattresses from old for the Sailors' Home, the weekly hours devoted to mending as though mending were as natural as breathing.5 It was. For her generation, it was.
A tool only disappears when the knowledge it serves has been removed.
The darning mushroom did not break. It did not wear out. Boxwood lasts centuries. What disappeared was not the object but the grammar — the set of assumptions, skills, and material relationships that made the object meaningful. The mushroom assumed wool socks. Wool socks assumed darning. Darning assumed a population that could read the weave of a fabric and reconstruct it by hand. Remove any element of that grammar, and the mushroom becomes what it is in the antiques shop: beautiful, functionless, requiring explanation.
We did not lose this grammar. It was taken. And the taking was so thorough that most of us now carry the absence as a personality trait rather than a historical fact.
II. The Commons
The word "mend" comes from the Latin emendare — ex meaning "out of" and menda meaning "fault" or "blemish."6 To remove fault. To free from error. To correct. The word entered English around 1200, first applied to clothes, tools, and buildings, then expanding by 1300 to moral and spiritual repair — amending one's life.6 The noun "mend," meaning a repaired place in fabric, dates only to 1888.6
Notice what the word assumes. Damage is a temporary condition. The natural response to a broken thing is to make it whole. The Latin root does not contain the concept of disposal. It does not imagine a world where the standard response to a fault is to discard the object that carries it. For eight hundred years, the word pointed in one direction: toward restoration.
We changed the assumption. We kept the word. It sits in our language now like the darning mushroom sits in the antiques shop — still shaped for a purpose the world around it no longer supports.
What the Make Do and Mend campaign restored — briefly, under the pressure of war — was not just a set of skills. It was a cognitive commons. A body of shared practical knowledge, transmitted across generations, assumed as a baseline of ordinary competence. Knowing how to darn, patch, re-sole, maintain — these were not specialisms. They were common knowledge, held in common, in the same way that common land was held before the enclosures: not owned by anyone, available to everyone, necessary for self-sufficiency.
The CC41 Utility Clothing Scheme, introduced in 1941, had by September 1942 specified forty approved cloths — nineteen wool, sixteen cotton, four rayon, and one locknit — and enforced durability standards on all civilian clothing.7 Austerity provisions governed the construction of every garment: the number of buttons, pleats, and pockets; the height of heels; the amount of lace and embroidery. These restrictions yielded savings of approximately four million square yards of cotton annually.7 The CC41 mark, attributed to designer Reginald Shipp of the Board of Trade's Directorate of Civilian Clothing, was stamped on every Utility product.7 It told the consumer: this fabric has been tested. It will last. It deserves maintenance.
This was not rationing as deprivation. It was rationing as quality guarantee. As the Museum of Cornish Life describes, the scheme created clothing "affordable for the working person, and also durable enough to last being worn for years."7 Objects were legible — the mark was material information, readable, trustworthy. And the population that wore these objects was literate in the grammar of maintenance. They could read the weave, diagnose the wear, perform the repair. The commons was intact.
Then the war ended. And the commons was re-enclosed.
Clothes rationing ended on 15 March 1949. The Utility scheme ended in 1952. All rationing ended on 4 July 1954.4 On 20 July 1957, Harold Macmillan stood at a Conservative rally at Queens Park in Bedford and told the country: "Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good."8 The speech was partly a warning about inflation, but that is not how it was received. It was received as permission. Between 1950 and 1970, car ownership in Britain increased more than fourfold.9 Television sets went from a novelty to a fixture in nearly every home. Consumer spending became economic strategy. The advertising industry, its techniques perfected during wartime propaganda, pivoted smoothly from "repair is patriotic" to "new is progress."
In 1954, an industrial designer named Brooks Stevens used "planned obsolescence" as the title of a talk at an advertising conference in Minneapolis. His definition: "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary."10
Note the precision. Not "making products that break." Making people want to replace things before they need to. The shame did not invert by accident. It was designed. Before the war: repair was patriotic, resourceful, a mark of competence. After: repair was associated with poverty, with inability to afford the new, with backwardness. Wearing a visibly mended garment went from badge of civic duty to badge of deprivation within a single generation.
Every skill removed creates a market.
We can see this now with the clarity of distance. Can't cook — the ready meal market fills the gap. Can't mend — fast fashion fills the wardrobe. The UK now buys more clothes per person than any other country in Europe.11 Can't maintain — the replacement economy swallows what's broken. Can't repair — the planned obsolescence cycle generates its own demand. The pattern is not subtle. It is an economic architecture, each node generating revenue: the replacement purchase, the waste disposal, the extraction of new raw materials, the extended warranty on the new unit. In 2022, according to market research data, 8.6 million extended warranty policies were sold in the United Kingdom — 8.6 million quiet admissions that the things we buy cannot be trusted to last.12
The optimist's case is not unreasonable, and we should state it honestly. Products became genuinely cheaper. A budget washing machine costs two hundred pounds. Repair became genuinely more expensive — the average UK repair runs between seventy and four hundred pounds, with a callout fee of sixty to a hundred and fifty before anyone touches the machine.13 Women were freed from compulsory domesticity. Consumer choice expanded. Material standards of living rose. These are real gains. Real people benefited.
The question is not whether the gains were real. The question is what was lost inside them — and whether the loss was accidental or structural.
III. The Enclosure
Between 1604 and 1914, the English Parliament enacted over 5,200 enclosure Bills, enclosing approximately 6.8 million acres — just over one-fifth of the total area of England.14 Common land — grazing rights, firewood, water, the shared resources that allowed communities to sustain themselves — was fenced, privatised, removed. The more productive enclosed farms required fewer workers. Villagers without land and grazing rights moved to the cities, searching for work in the factories of the industrial revolution.14
The enclosures were not a conspiracy. Each Bill was locally rational — a landowner acting in their economic interest, supported by Parliament. Nobody planned the aggregate dispossession of rural England. But the structural logic was consistent: self-sufficient people are bad labourers. Remove their self-sufficiency, and you create a workforce that must sell its time to survive.
I am drawing a structural parallel, not an equivalence. Nobody was evicted for failing to darn. Nobody rioted when Home Economics was removed from the curriculum. The mechanisms were different — legislation and fencing in the seventeenth century; product redesign, curriculum reform, and advertising in the twentieth. But the logic is the same. Self-sufficient people are bad consumers. Remove their competence, and you create a population that must buy what it once provided for itself.
Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality, called the endpoint "radical monopoly" — the condition where "one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need."15 What makes a radical monopoly radical is not market dominance but the elimination of alternatives. "Monopoly is hard to get rid of," Illich wrote, "when it has frozen not only the shape of the physical world but also the range of behavior and imagination."15
That freezing is what interests me. When someone says "I'll just buy a new one" about a shirt with a torn seam, they are not making a free market decision. They are speaking from inside an enclosure so complete they cannot see its walls. The alternative — mending — has been rendered not just inconvenient but unimaginable. Not because they lack the intelligence. Because the grammar was removed.
The enclosure operated on three fronts simultaneously. I want to trace each one, because the convergence is the point — not conspiracy, but three rational forces that arrived at the same destination.
The objects changed. Goodyear welt shoe construction — stitched, visible, repairable — was the standard through the mid-twentieth century. Today it has been almost entirely displaced. The overwhelming majority of shoes worldwide are now cemented: glued together with adhesive that, when removed, destroys the upper.16 SATRA, the footwear industry's own research body, documents the transformation — cement sole-attaching systems introduced in the mid-1920s have become the dominant construction method in global footwear manufacturing, making welted construction a niche reserved for the luxury market.16 The shoe was not made cheaper. It was made unrepairable. The construction method is the planned obsolescence. A cobbler looks at a cemented shoe and sees nothing to work with. The shoe has been rendered mute — materially illegible, its construction hidden, its repair pathway sealed.
The same principle extends everywhere we look. Screws replaced by adhesive. Steel components by plastic. Batteries glued under motherboards, requiring near-total disassembly for service.17 The objects that once spoke to their maintainers — a sock showing its weave, a shoe revealing its stitching, a CC41 mark certifying durability — were systematically redesigned to communicate nothing. The lost grammar of the series title is not a metaphor. It is literally the material language that objects once spoke and we were once literate enough to read.
The education was dismantled. Before 1975, Domestic Science was a school subject available — unjustly — only to female students. The Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 made it unlawful to restrict subject access by gender.18 During the parliamentary debate, one peer expressed the hope that boys should cook and girls should know how to mend fuses — the ambition being that the curriculum would open in both directions.18
The answer should have been to teach everyone. Instead, the system removed the subject from everyone.
The National Curriculum reforms that followed subsumed Woodwork, Metalwork, and other craft subjects into "Design and Technology," while Domestic Science was rebranded — first as "Home Economics," then as "Food Technology."19 As reported by BBC Radio 4's Food Programme, the Thatcher government sought "technologists" skilled at designing theoretical food products rather than people capable of preparing actual meals.19 In 2015, the Home Economics GCSE was replaced by "Food Preparation and Nutrition," and the Food A-level was cancelled — creating a dead end in practical skills education.19 Today, surveys suggest that over half of all primary schools give fewer than ten hours of food teaching per year, and seventy-five percent lack dedicated pupil kitchens.19
This is where we must hold two truths at once, and the holding is uncomfortable.
The feminist critique of gendered Domestic Science was entirely legitimate. Restricting cooking, sewing, and household maintenance to girls reinforced patriarchal roles. The Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s explicitly identified these tasks — the darning, the patching, the invisible maintenance labour — as a form of exploitation.20 Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, argued that the dispossession of women's domestic knowledge was not incidental to capitalist restructuring but central to it.21 These critiques were right.
And: the corporate outcome was real. Every skill removed from the curriculum created a market. The population that could no longer cook bought ready meals. The population that could no longer mend bought new clothes. The feminist goal of equality was answered not by redistribution of competence but by elimination of competence — and someone profited from every skill that disappeared. As Ursula Huws argued in Feminist Review, the tasks of housework have undergone "dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour."22 The skills were removed. The gendered burden of purchasing the replacements remained.
We all participated in this. We all benefited from the convenience. The implication is shared, and I am confessing from inside it, not accusing from outside.
The economics were redesigned. The repair price scissors: product prices driven down through material substitution, offshore manufacturing, and shorter design lifespans, while repair costs were driven up through scarce labour, proprietary parts, and diagnostic lockouts. The two blades cut together, making repair economically irrational — not because repair is inherently expensive but because the pricing architecture was restructured to make it so.13
You have to admire the completeness, if nothing else.
Three fronts. Three rational processes. No coordinating committee. No memo marked "Operation Dispossess." Just a structural incentive that each actor followed independently: a product designer choosing cemented construction because it is cheaper to manufacture; an education minister choosing "Food Technology" because it sounds more modern; an advertising executive choosing "new is better" because it sells more product. Each decision locally rational. Each decision removing one more element of the maintenance grammar. The aggregate outcome: a population conditioned into what the psychologist Martin Seligman called "learned helplessness" — the state where repeated failure teaches the subject that effort is futile, so they stop trying.23
"I'm not handy." "I'm hopeless with tools." "I can't even sew a button."
These are not descriptions of who we are. They are descriptions of what was done to us. UK surveys suggest that one in nine young Brits cannot change a light bulb. A quarter of Generation Z report they would pay someone to do it for them.24 Two-thirds of the British population feel they lack basic DIY competence.24 These are not skills statistics. They are helplessness metrics — the psychological residue of an enclosure so complete the enclosed cannot see the walls.
The enclosure is complete when the enclosed mistake their dispossession for their nature.
IV. The Grammar
Not everyone lost it.
In the thirteenth century, during the Kamakura period, a word entered the Japanese language: mottainai. The core element, mottai, was a Buddhist term referring to the inherent essence of a thing — its proper state, its true nature.25 Nai expressed absence. Mottainai was the feeling of regret at the slighting of that essential value — the lament when something's true nature was wasted or disrespected. The concept has roots in both Zen Buddhism and Shinto, where objects are understood to harbour kami — spirits deserving of reverence.25
Mottainai is not sentimentality. It is theology. To waste an object is to disrespect the spirit that inhabits it. Under this framework, disposal is not a neutral economic act. It is a spiritual transgression.
Often linked in discussions of Japanese material philosophy is kintsugi — the practice of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. As Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, kintsugi "does not attempt to hide the breaks but instead draws attention to them."26 The repair is made visible. The gold lines become the most beautiful part of the vessel. The break is not failure. It is biography.
And connected to both is wabi-sabi — the aesthetic that finds beauty in impermanence, wear, and imperfection. Under wabi-sabi, a darned sock is not diminished. It is enriched by its history.
Three interlocking concepts. Seven hundred years of philosophical infrastructure. A culture that made maintenance not just rational but meaningful — anchored in spiritual conviction, not wartime necessity.
In Finland, a clergyman named Uno Cygnaeus started educational sloyd in 1865 and convinced the Finnish government to make it compulsory — initially for male students in all rural schools — the following year.27 The policy was later universalised. Sloyd — from the Swedish slojd, meaning craft or skill — was built on a principle that the English-speaking world would spend the next century dismantling: the integration of "head, heart, and hand."27 Working with your hands was not menial labour. It was moral, intellectual, and emotional development. It was how you became a whole person.
One hundred and sixty years later, all Finnish pupils — regardless of gender — study both textile crafts and woodworking for the first seven years of comprehensive school. Home Economics remains mandatory in grades seven through nine.27 The tradition is unbroken. The grammar is intact.
The contrast tells us something we might prefer not to hear.
Britain had emergency pragmatism. Make Do and Mend worked because the war demanded it. When the emergency passed, the skills had no philosophical anchor. No theology that made waste a transgression. No educational philosophy that made craft a component of moral development. Just necessity — and necessity, it turns out, is a temporary landlord. The moment the rent was paid, we moved out.
Japan had mottainai. Finland had sloyd. Britain had rationing, and when rationing ended, the commons was re-enclosed within twelve years.
This is not an argument that Japan or Finland are utopias. Every society has its failures. But it is an existence proof. The enclosure was not inevitable. Cultures that built philosophical infrastructure around maintenance kept the grammar. Cultures that relied on emergency pragmatism lost it the moment the emergency passed. The difference is not genetic, not geographic, not mysterious. It is architectural. They built load-bearing walls around maintenance. We built temporary scaffolding and called it culture.
The darning mushroom sits in the antiques shop in Sussex. The boxwood is still smooth. The dome still fits inside a sock. But the sock has changed — polyester now, smooth-fibred, resistant to darning at the molecular level. Wool's keratin structure, with its microscopic crimp and its capacity to absorb thirty percent of its weight in moisture, gives the fibre a natural grip — new thread can bond into the existing structure.28 Polyester does not grip. It does not absorb. When it develops a hole, the clean-edged break in its smooth synthetic fibres resists the reconstruction that darning performs on natural materials. The sock was redesigned. The tool was made redundant. The grammar was silenced.
And the person has changed too. Nella Last, in Barrow-in-Furness, devoted hours each week to mending because mending was as natural as breathing — because the materials invited it, the tools enabled it, the culture assumed it, and the government supported it.5 Her granddaughter's generation cannot identify the tool. Not because they are less intelligent. Because every element of the grammar that made the tool meaningful — the wool, the weave, the skill, the education, the infrastructure, the philosophy — has been removed.
We were not always like this. For most of human history, maintenance was ordinary. Objects were legible. Repair was assumed. The grammar was shared.
We did not lose it through carelessness or stupidity or the inevitable march of progress. We lost it through a series of identifiable decisions — each one locally rational, each one removing one more word from the shared vocabulary of competence — until the language was gone and we stood in the antiques shop, turning the mushroom over in our hands, unable to name what we were holding.
But the mushroom is still here. The boxwood is still warm. And the fact that it requires explanation — that two customers could not recognise a tool that every household once owned — is not evidence that we are helpless. It is evidence that the enclosure happened. And enclosures are human constructions. They were not always here. They need not always remain.
That recognition is not nothing.
Dominic Vale writes about why we are the way we are.
What Changes
This is not a piece about what to do. It is a piece about what to see. But seeing changes things, and three things are worth seeing clearly.
The enclosure is visible once you name it. The next time you hear yourself say "I'm not handy" or "I can't even sew a button," notice the grammar. That is not a description of your nature. It is a description of what was removed — and when you see the removal, you stop carrying it as a personal failing.
The objects still speak, if you learn to listen. Look at the construction of the things you own. Where the screws are. Whether they can be opened. Whether the materials invite repair or resist it. The legibility of an object is itself information — about who the manufacturer thinks you are, and what they expect you to do when the thing breaks.
The commons can be rebuilt. Repair cafes, tool libraries, community workshops, open-source repair manuals — these are not nostalgia projects. They are acts of re-enclosure in reverse: shared knowledge, held in common, available to anyone willing to learn. The grammar was not destroyed. It was enclosed. And enclosures, as we have seen, are human constructions.