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Steve Overthrow, Sieve & Riddle Maker
River Parrett, Langport
On the bank of the River Parrett in Langport sits an old building called Great Western House, also known as the Shakespear Glass Building. Inside, various craftspeople work as part of the Langport Creative Collective. It was here I arranged to meet and photograph Steve Overthrow, who has revived the dead art of producing handmade sieves and riddles.
Steve worked on vintage Riley cars for nine years, and has always had a passion for the old, slow-paced ways of working, when things were built to last by craftsmen. When the car job came to an end, he took up other work.
“It was in June 2017 that I received a newsletter from the Heritage Crafts Association. In there was an article that said sieve and riddle making was extinct. I had a look — I could do with a good sieve — and remember sitting down and doing some research to find out how to make the tools. There was next to no information, other than a video audiobook and the social media trail left by the last sieve maker, who had died a few years after taking it on from Mike Turnock, who’d done it since the ’70s.”
“The craft became extinct, and everything — tooling, patterns, knowledge — was lost or binned. Extinct for five years. I had to relearn everything, picking every piece of information out of the limited text and pictures I could find.”
“Come the 13th of March 2018, I had made the tooling to make the sieves and riddles, and had my first sieve made. I took a picture, put it on social media, which the Heritage Crafts Association shared.”
A Chance Connection
“With a stroke of luck, a lady got in touch via social media saying her family made sieves, and her brother had been the last one to run the family business. She asked if I’d like to see the bits she had from it — newspaper cuttings, a video. I said yes please. She said her brother ‘Mike’ had run the business. I said wait a minute, do you mean Mike Turnock? Yes, that’s him — have you been in touch? He’d retired to Bridport, an hour away from me. Just amazing.”
“I eventually met Mike, who was extremely helpful with all the little niggly things I could never have researched — meshes, wire sizes, uses, sources. The knowledge he was only too happy to share, and to this day I can’t thank him enough.”
The whole process happens in-house — cutting, steam-bending, weaving, fitting the meshes. Most pieces are made to order, everything bespoke, with a 15-year guarantee and an expected life of 60 to 80 years, 0% plastic. Handmade in Somerset, England. Steve was later featured in Country Life magazine.
Based in Somerset, working across the UK and internationally.