The man making buckets for TV hits and royal homes

When it comes to the very niche subject of wooden buckets, there is very little Alan Paulus does not know.

He is thought to be one of the only professional wooden bucket makers left in the UK and one of a handful left in the world.

His latest commission will see him make buckets for the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace, and previous commissions have included the TV blockbuster Game of Thrones.

With a long waiting list for orders, and almost 20,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, the 65-year-old from Dereham, Norfolk, said he had no plans of giving up soon.

"I just love buckets," Mr Paulus laughs.

"It all started when I made a hot tub for a YouTube video in 2019. It started me down a little road, and it's rapidly become the tail that wags the dog."

As well as bucket making – known as domestic coopering – Mr Paulus is also a wheelwright, which involves making wooden wheels for carriages, carts, cannons and bicycles.

He said the bulk of his clients were battle re-enactment groups and museums, as well as the TV and film industry.

"The most bizarre commission I had was a lady who purchased a brine tub - a large ship's bucket with a lid - one of my most expensive buckets," he said.

"She wanted it for toilet roll storage."

Mr Paulus sells buckets, which range from sauna buckets to butter churns, for up to £140.

He is currently making an Anglo Saxon burial bucket for Ipswich Museum, and later this month will begin making buckets for the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace – the former home of King Henry VIII.

"Metal and plastic buckets overtook wooden buckets purely because of sheer cost," he said.

"But they don't look so nice and they don't have a story. Nobody comes along and says, 'That's a lovely bucket you've got there.'

"Whereas if you've got one made of cherry wood, people get excited about that."

According to research by the charity Heritage Crafts, coopering is considered an endangered profession, while other crafts, such as watch making, basket furniture making and glass eye making are deemed critically endangered.

"It's quite sad really because we need to encourage more apprentices to pass these crafts on," Mr Paulus said.

"The issue is, while I can get funding to pay an apprentice for two years, at the end of it I either have to employ them full-time or let them go – and the problem with that is you train-up your competition.

"So in order to get around that I make my YouTube videos as informative as possible, so when I'm not doing it any more someone else can keep it going."

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