The Great Copper Mountain

Falun, Bergslagen and a thousand years of Swedish copper. How a mine became a colour, a heritage site and the logo on an LJB wallet and belt.

The open pit of the Falun copper mine, its walls banded in rust red and ochre beneath a pale northern sky.

The mountain

Falun lies in Dalarna, in the middle of Sweden. Beside the town is a hole. It was a mountain of copper. Over roughly a thousand years, people carried the mountain away, and the town grew around what was left. This is Stora Kopparberget, the Great Copper Mountain, and for much of its life it was the wealth of the Swedish state.

No one knows the first year. The mine is older than its records, and the records are old.

1288

The earliest is a document from 1288, in which a bishop of Västerås exchanged an estate for a share of the mountain. The parchment survives, and it is often described as the oldest surviving share certificate in the world. Whatever the truth of the title, the fact behind it is remarkable: more than seven centuries ago, Swedes were already dividing ownership of the copper beneath their feet and trading it.

The company that grew from those shares endured, under one name or another, into the present day. Few institutions of any kind can claim that continuity.

Two thirds of Europe

Sweden’s seventeenth century was built on this metal. At its peak the mine supplied around two thirds of Europe’s copper, and the coin, roofing and cannon of the continent came in part from a single hill in Dalarna. For more than a century Sweden’s money was copper plate, too heavy for a pocket. The green roofs of Stockholm are the same metal.

Then, in the summer of 1687, after centuries of tunnelling, the mountain gave way. The galleries fell into a single vast pit. It was Midsummer, and no one was underground. Work resumed around the edge of the collapse and did not stop for another three hundred years, but the age of abundance had passed.

The colour

Little was wasted. The ore left a residue rich in iron and ochre. Burnt, ground and mixed with rye flour, water and linseed oil, it became a paint. Falu red. It has been made in much the same way for centuries.

Wooden houses across Sweden are still painted with it, barn after barn, cottage after cottage, the same deep red against green field and grey rock. The colour of the Swedish countryside is a by-product of a mine.

Bergslagen

Falun is one point in a wider country. Bergslagen runs across central Sweden: forest, lake and ore. The name belongs to no province. It comes from a trade: a bergslag was a mining district. Iron for the most part, silver at Sala, copper at Falun. Forges stood on the rivers, and the names are still on the map: Kopparberg, Nora, Norberg, Grängesberg.

Bergslagen made the Swedish relationship with metal a practical one. Ore was dug, smelted and shaped by people who lived beside it, and the skill passed through families. That closeness between material and maker is what LJB means by craftsmanship: not a word, but a way of working.

From mine to design

Mining at Falun ended in 1992. In 2001 UNESCO inscribed the mine and the landscape around it as a World Heritage site. The pit was not filled. It was kept.

Sweden went on working metal. Only the scale changed. Copper and brass came down from the roof and out of the mint and went indoors: the lamp, the bowl, the handle, the buckle. Swedish design took the country’s own materials and made them plain. Nothing was added that did not need to be there. That is the tradition LJB works in.

The LJB Leather Wallet has an exterior of dark blue textured leather, after the cobbles of Gamla stan, and an interior of smooth brown leather with card slots and a diagonal pocket. On the front sits a small logo in copper. It is the metal of the mountain, and it stands for a metalwork tradition that is older than the records.

The LJB Signature Leather Belt is premium brown leather, and its logo is copper too. The reference is different. Here the copper is the ground itself: the ore fields, the red earth, the mineral country under the forest. It is the landscape, worn close. Same metal, different memory.

Each piece belongs to a numbered series. The number is known to the buyer and to no one else. On each, the copper is kept small. That is deliberate. A thousand years is a heavy thing to carry, and it is better carried lightly.

The collection