Our Story
How it began
In 2015, Bella Day discovered a YouTube video of Ford Hallam at work. It was a Tsuba, a Japanese sword guard, and she was spellbound. The precision, the intention, the way he worked with the metal: it was unlike anything she'd encountered before. She knew she had to meet him.
What followed changed everything. Ford and Bella fell in love with each other, and with a shared vision of what metalsmithing could be. Working together, Ford became both her teacher and her partner. He gave her the name Iron Snail, a poetic reference to the patient, deliberate grace of her approach to the craft and connected to his school 'Following the Iron Brush'.
Over the years, Ford taught Bella the Japanese techniques that he had honed over the previous thirty years: Kinko work, and other intricate metalsmithing traditions that demand meditation as much as skill. She trained under a master, refined her own practice, and together they created pieces that married English goldsmithing traditions with Japanese metalworking philosophy.
Foss Street
In 2019, they moved to Dartmouth and established The Remarkable Goldsmiths on Foss Street, in the heart of the artisan quarter. It was the right home for their vision: a studio where traditional craft could flourish, where every piece would be made with the intention and care that had drawn them together.
During this time, Bella discovered the story of a Tudor heart: a piece of jewellery found in an English field by a metal detectorist, centuries old and still utterly beautiful. It inspired her to create her own version, the Tudor Locking Loveheart: a piece honouring the past while speaking to the present. These dainty but detailed pieces have become a signature of her work: historically inspired, one-of-a-kind, and made to endure.
Now
Ford Hallam passed away in 2024.
He was the master who saw something in Bella before she saw it in herself. He was the artist who gave her a name and made it mean something profound. He was her teacher, her partner, the collaborator who shaped not just her technical practice but her entire vision of what it means to be a goldsmith. For nearly a decade, they worked side by side, creating pieces together, refining techniques together, building something neither could have built alone.
His loss is immense.
But what Ford gave Bella didn't end. Every technique she learned from him, every Japanese method, every refinement of hand and eye remains in her hands, in her work, in the studio on Foss Street. She carries his standards, his precision, his belief that metalsmithing is a form of devotion.
Every piece she makes carries Ford with it: his influence, his exacting standards, his insistence that jewellery worthy of a lifetime must be made with a lifetime of intention. The Remarkable Goldsmiths continues as a testament to what they built together and to what Bella carries forward from him.
The studio remains devoted to slow, intentional craft. To techniques refined over centuries. To the marriage of English and Japanese metalworking. To making things that matter.
Each piece is a collaboration between past and present, between the hands that shaped it and the life it will hold.
