Range of Chairs in  High Wycombe archive factory

BNU alumnus Jay Blades receives MBE

Buckinghamshire New University alumnus Jay Blades has received an MBE for his services to craft today after learning about his award in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list last year.

Blades, 51, hosts the popular BBC Programme, The Repair Shop, and has spent most of his working life encouraging young people to develop their skillsets and get involved with practical jobs.

The furniture restorer spent his 20s working in factories, then after studying criminology as a mature student at BNU, he started a charity working with disadvantaged young people to understand how they were being treated by police officers.

Blades later set up charity Out of the Dark where he taught young people how to restore and sell old furniture to make them job-ready and to believe in themselves more. He now runs social enterprise Jay & Co, which helps disadvantaged and disengaged groups.

His book Making It recalls Blades’ childhood in Hackney and the challenges he has overcome, which have now culminated in a MBE.

On finding out about his MBE last year, he told PA news agency: “What craft has done for me is allowed me to achieved the unachievable. When you can make something, you can actually see a tangible object that is there that you have achieved.

“I came out of school with no GCSEs, no qualifications. I went to university, studied and got a degree – but when you make something, it is like, ‘I made that’.

“If you make something for your house, every day when you walk past it you have this sense of achievement that is just like, ‘Wow – yeah, I did that’.”

Picture of Jay Blades receiving his MBE

Jay Blades MBE

Source: Press Association via Metro