When other students were out drinking and chasing girls, Chris Topp was touring old factories. But his obsession led him to become one of the world's leading experts in a dying craft, and, as Nick Morrison reports, he doesn't mind ruffling a few feathers in the process.

CHRIS Topp is something of an addict. It's an occasionally hazardous craving which started when he was at university, and has landed him in quite a bit of trouble over the years. But, no matter what anyone says, the lure of the forge always proves too strong.

"When you work with hot metal it is a beautiful experience," he says. "It's a strange thing to say to someone who has no experience of it, but there is something about it which is almost addictive.

"It's a very elemental thing to be doing, with iron and fire and water, and you feel there is a certain magic taking place, an importance out of all proportion to what it is. We're making somebody a gate, but when you are actually forging the metal, distorting it, it feels really important."

But Chris is no ordinary blacksmith. He's one of the country's leading exponents of wrought ironwork, keeping alive a craft which had its heyday more than 100 years ago, before it sank into disuse and the necessary skills all but lost. He's also the only supplier of wrought iron in the world.

It's a position which puts him much in demand, and has taken him from his North Yorkshire home into some of the finest houses in the country. Work has just finished on new gates for the House of Commons, and the list of addresses now sporting his handiwork reads like a guide to the stately piles of England: the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace, St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, Somerset House, the National Gallery.

"It's a hoot working on those properties, getting to know the people who work there. We have worked in nearly all the big addresses in London," he says. "I suppose we have achieved a certain notoriety, which is quite gratifying."

HIS obsession started in earnest at Newcastle University, where he studied civil engineering. "My primary interest was industrial archaeology, and in the 1970s you could still experience a great deal of Victorian industry," he says.

"Instead of going out and looking for girls, we used to go out looking for old factories and coal mines and steelworks. These were the days before health and safety so you could just walk into these places and see what was going on. I have had a lifetime's love affair with Victorian heavy industry."

After graduating, he formed a restoration company with university friends, before moving onto producing cast iron street furniture, and then into blacksmithing. "I wanted to investigate the forge work aspects of Victorian technology," he says.

He took over an existing blacksmith's in Derbyshire, but when that proved too small he moved to North Yorkshire and now runs a forge at Carlton Miniott near Thirsk, and a rolling mill, where the wrought iron is produced and larger projects undertaken, at Tholthorpe, near Boroughbridge.

"There was no demand for ornamental forge work at the time," he says. "All things Victorian were being destroyed as fast as people could get their hands on them, and baroque art was really frowned upon. Modernism and craftsmanship don't really go together.

"But it was a bit of a gimmick. I did things other people didn't do, and eventually your name gets around."

Rather than cater to the trends of the time, Chris's fascination with all things Victorian led him to try and use the same methods as 19th century blacksmiths, and work in the same material, wrought iron. At one time wrought iron was the only material available for metalwork, but the arrival of mild steel saw it swiftly drop out of favour. Now, the only source of wrought iron is recycling, mostly heavy chains but also railings.

But the very properties which made it redundant are those which attract Chris. "It is a material which demands a great deal out of the practitioner. It is very, very different to the modern stuff, and it presents in a different way. It lasts three or four times as long, and it has a lot of other properties a blacksmith will value.

"It is a very skilled job, and with wrought iron there is no way of cheating, you have to be good," he says.

But it wasn't long before this new kid on the anvil was making waves. Not only was he championing a return to Victorian methods and materials, he made no effort to hide his disdain for modern practices.

'IMET an awful lot of resentment from other blacksmiths who didn't want this upstart telling them they had been doing it wrong all these years," he says. "The modern state of the art is so bad, in the 19th century they would not have considered it work at all. A seven-year-old would have been able to work to that standard.

"The degree of skill was far higher than any working skill nowadays. They think they're doing a good job, they think it's state of the art, but the problem is the state of the art is cr*p.

"The workshop should be part of the work of art. The work of art begins at the beginning of the manufacturing process and not at the end of it, I think every part of the process should have its own beauty."

He says some blacksmiths have since come around to his way of thinking, and the heritage industry is starting to see the value of using traditional methods and materials, although he despairs at decisions to give grade one listed ironwork to steel fabricators to restore. It may be authentic, but wrought ironwork is time-consuming, and therefore expensive.

A small and specialist market has also made it harder to develop the level of skills, without the competitive urge that fired Victorian practitioners. As a result, Chris believes they are still a long way short of reaching 19th century standards.

"The list of things we can't do is getting shorter, but we will never get back to the standards of the people who made this stuff originally. We're researching backwards, to achieve old ways of doing things," he says.

CHRIS tends to do less hands-on work now. Instead, he's out championing the past and is much in demand at international conferences of blacksmiths. In any case, he says, he has people working for him far more skilled than he is. He has a staff of 14 at his two sites and regularly takes blacksmiths from abroad who want to broaden their experience.

He has also moved into what he calls predictive archaeology, researching objects from the past to find out how they were made, including a Viking padlock for the Yorvik Centre in York, an axe for the Tower of London, and a working replica of a cannon from the Mary Rose.

Despite his efforts, his fear is that the revival of Victorian blacksmithing is still not established. The cost of the raw material - around £100 a tonne - and the degree of skill required to work it, has prevented more than a handful of others from following his lead.

"It really hasn't been easy. It has been driven by enthusiasm, we have never profited very much, and anybody with any commercial sense would not have bothered with it at all," he says.

"It is a struggle, and every so often you wonder if it is worth bothering. Is the world going to be a worse place if they can't do ornamental ironwork? Probably not. But it is better than making plastic ducks."