This chapter traces the historical ideas and practices relating to young people’s participation in manual work into the present. Claire Cameron claimed in her professorial lecture (2018) that there is a ‘thread’ which connects her experiences as a pupil at Kilquhanity to current ‘creative and practical opportunities for young people’. This chapter explores whether and how far the ‘thread’ of ‘useful work’, craft and building for young people persists in the present by analysing: popular and research literature; written accounts and interviews about relevant contemporary settings and projects, mainly but not exclusively in the UK; and a self-ethnography of the author’s own practices at Wilderness Wood, a community woodland and home education hub. It also draws on the ways in which the sites of the case study schools are now used and how ex-pupils perceive the traditions of manual work carrying on, or not, —through their own life stories but also their children’s and grandchildren’s stories.