Mike Shipp is the last of Worthing's blacksmiths and when he retires it will mark the end of a trade dating back centuries.

He operates from a backstreet forge dating back to Victorian times next to the Swan pub in Little High Street.

On the wall outside hangs a wrought iron sign depicting an anvil, while inside the walls have been blackened by decades of smoke from the furnace.

Mike, 60, is the last of his kind in a town which lost its only other smithy, Madgwicks, situated in a yard off Montague Street, about ten years ago.

He took up the profession in 1971, on the day VAT was introduced by the Government, having been taught the tricks of the trade by Bill Saunders, whose name still adorns the forge.

Mike said: "I started off in the Fifties as a self-employed motorcycle mechanic and I used to come in here to get little welding jobs done.

"I started doing the odd bit of welding myself for Mr Saunders and, as the British motorcycle industry was dying, I came in here full-time.

"I took over the forge in 1971 but I never changed the name over."

There were once four brick forges in the workshop but today Mike operates only one, which he fashioned from metal himself about 20 years ago.

He works alone in the workshop, where the tools of his predecessors still hang from nails in the wall, near a grime-stained Fifties Grundig radio, which only recently gave up the ghost.

When Mike started, he had a base of about 35 regular customers, doing mainly small jobs, such as brackets which are now readily available in DIY stores.

Thirty years on, he concentrates on ornate balustrades, gates, railings and weathervanes.

Mike said: "I have been doing more gates lately than I have made for ages. Following September 11, people are starting to spend on their houses rather than their holidays."

The forge used to shoe railway horses until the late Fifties but Mike said: "I don't do horses. I make the odd horseshoe for weddings or people moving home but I have never fancied sticking them on horses."

Weathervanes are increasingly popular and his work can be seen at Mill Close, off Mill Road, Worthing.

Mike, who moved to Worthing with his family at the age of three, has no one lined up to follow in his footsteps, stating: "My son is a pen and paper man."

But he has no plans to hang up his hammer in the immediate future.