Jeweller shines light on UK’s endangered diamond craft

Husanbhai and Shabnam Shaikh are facing the wall in the corner of an office in London’s jewellery quarter, leaning over a scaif. It is on this spinning wheel, coated with diamond powder, that the father and daughter polish diamonds.

This is a rare sight in the UK, where the charity Heritage Crafts deems diamond cutting to be “critically endangered”. But Husanbhai, known in the trade as Hasim, is doing his bit to keep the industry alive. He has been passing on his skills to his daughter for three years at his business, Noor Diamonds, in Hatton Garden. Those skills have been honed since he started in the profession in 1972 in the Indian city of Navsari, near the global diamond cutting and polishing hub of Surat.

Hasim reckons it takes at least five years to train as a diamond polisher (the terms cutter and polisher are used interchangeably), although he is “still learning every single day”. He already knows Shabnam has what it takes. “She’s better than me,” he says.

The pair’s skills are on show in 11 one-of-a-kind rings launching on Tuesday, the first designs by Ruth Tomlinson to include diamonds hand cut in London. These gold pieces are additions to the jeweller’s existing Hoard and Lustre collections, and she plans to expand her use of London-cut diamonds to other lines at a later date.

Tomlinson bought raw cognac, champagne, pale yellow and off-white diamonds from a supplier in London, and worked with Hasim to decide the best forms that could be created from them with the least waste. “He’s so wise about these stones and he could see things that I wasn’t able to see in the stone,” she says. “He’d look at it and say, ‘Oh, you know, we can’t cut that there, that’s maybe an inclusion, that won’t be strong enough.’ So it was really fascinating, him teaching me about what to look for.”

They decided on table, French and rose cuts, but at Tomlinson’s request Hasim did not facet the back of some of the stones because she wanted the contrast between the natural rough and the handcrafted diamond. Shabnam created some free-form rose cuts. “That was quite exciting because . . . I haven’t worked on something like that before,” says Shabnam. The resulting rings are Tomlinson’s fourth collection in the past couple of years for which she has worked closely with a cutter.

Last month, she launched the Rahasa sapphire collection, which used the expertise of a Sri Lankan lapidarist. This followed designs featuring Scottish agate and Cornish turquoise.

Tomlinson was unaware there were diamond cutters still in Hatton Garden until she did some research. “Because we are based in Hatton Garden, and we’ve used a lot of suppliers here for 20 years plus, it’s really nice to be able to work with local craftsmen,” she says. Using locally cut diamonds was more expensive compared with those cut in Surat, she adds. “But for our pieces I feel like our customers value the idea that it was created here and . . . the craftsmanship.”

Heritage Crafts added diamond cutting to its Red List of Endangered Crafts, first published in 2017, in 2021. Mary Lewis, lead researcher on the red list, says “critically endangered” crafts are those where “there’s a significant risk that the skills won’t be passed on”. She says the fact there are only between six and 10 diamond cutters in the UK “makes it fairly tenuous”. Threats to the viability of the industry include the high cost of rent in Hatton Garden, access to raw materials, equipment and training, and competition from India and China, she says. “There’s quite a lot of challenges for a small, independent craftsperson to be able to set up as a diamond cutter.”

Ilana Belsky, who learnt diamond cutting from her father more than 25 years ago, says she differentiates herself by specialising in free-form cuts. “Rather than planning it, I let the rough speak to me and I cut it in unusual ways,” explains Belsky, who is based in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. She says accessing rough diamonds is increasingly difficult because of competition from large cutting factories.

Belsky has a “niche market” working with 100 or so small independent jewellers and says her unusual diamonds “don’t fit very comfortably into the traditional supply chain”. As a result, she started designing jewellery that uses her cuts a couple of years ago, partly because she would like to take on an apprentice.

“I don’t want to be disingenuous in training someone up, to tell them there’s a career in the future cutting diamonds, when it’s a very difficult job to do at the moment myself,” says Belsky. “So I thought if I can create a way of selling these [cuts] myself to customers that then creates a funnel to be able to lead on to training someone else up.” She says wider help with training and recognition is needed to keep the industry going.

Lewis says the craft could become extinct in the UK but that there is “some reason to be optimistic” as the number of trainees and practitioners has increased since it entered the red list. The next biennial list will be published next year.