Alex Pole Ironwork

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Well, here’s a thing. Or rather two amazing things. I’ve written before about some of my more negative experiences of social media, but there is no doubt that it can be a great way to connect with like-minded people and, via Instagram, I came across Alex Pole Ironwork; a blacksmith based in Somerset.

I’m a great admirer of skilled craftspeople and looking through Alex’s feed and clicking through to his website it is clear that he and his team have skill in abundance. Their USP is that everything they make is forged by hand, meaning that it starts as a solid steel bar which is then heated and hammered into the finished article. They do pots, skillets, utensils, skewers and a whole host of other kit that the discerning BBQer will gaze upon and think to themselves “Here are many objects I desire greatly”.

Everything is beautiful.

Now since I am a chap possessed of a degree of financial prudence I did reign myself in a bit and had a look at what I NEEDED rather than merely WANTED. A good set of tongs were top of my list since the Morrisons ones we used all the time had died an untimely death. I had also been looking at the meat hooks Argentinian Asadors use to turn their mighty steaks so the BBQ fork also caught my eye.

At the time, everything was out of stock which I took to be a good sign as, after all, handmade items take longer to make I guess, so I checked back every couple of days with fingers firmly crossed. Once I’d ordered, the package arrived in 3 or 4 days just, as luck would have it, in time for our first BBQ guests following the March 29th emergence from lockdown restrictions.

They are amazing – a great blend of form and function with a really weighty heft to them. The tongs are excellent – nice and long to keep my hand away from the fire but still allow deft control of whatever I am cooking be it flatbreads or courgette slices. The design is great with no moving parts to go wrong, no spring to ping out at an inopportune moment. The fork is beautiful. You can see every hammer blow the smith has made which will surely make each one unique in its own small way. It does what I wanted it to do; a 1.2 kilo rib-eye was flipped with ease and sausages turned with no fuss. A nice finishing touch is the leather thong that you can use to hang it up with.

Not only do they look great and perform brilliantly, I have had fun arranging the fork and tongs in different ways to photograph them for this post so they resemble a kind of BBQ Deathly Hallows. Although not imbued with the ability to turn me invisible or re-animate a loved-one they are fantastic pieces of kit which I will appreciate each and every time I use them.

They are going to last me a lifetime I’m sure…