Michael May Knives

Michael May Knives has worked out of Portland Works since 2007 — a building the maker's own site describes as Sheffield's first purpose-built cutlery factory, dating to 1879. May calls himself a modern "Little Mester," the historical Sheffield term for an independent craftsman renting a single bench inside a shared factory building and working a trade start to finish alone, and states that each knife is hand-crafted from start to finish by one craftsman using locally sourced materials where possible.

The workshop's output splits into three strands: fully custom commissions, where clients choose handle material, blade shape, steel, and decorative filework to build a personalized pocket knife; a rotating stock of limited-edition and one-off pieces ready to buy immediately; and made-to-order runs of traditional Sheffield patterns — the site names Barlow, Erricks, and lambfoot styles specifically — alongside European- and Japanese-influenced kitchen knives, typically delivered in four to six weeks. The maker documents ongoing commissions through the workshop's own channels, showing work in handle materials such as spalted beech, snakewood, and apple wood alongside the finished pieces themselves.

Against Sheffield's large historic cutlery brands, Michael May represents the opposite end of the trade: a single working smith producing pocket and kitchen knives to order from inside the same Portland Works building that has housed Little Mesters since the Victorian era, rather than a factory-scale operation employing many hands under one name.