Professor Alexander Flint

London’s metallurgist of the furnace and the antique, at whose table collectors, engineers and Crown buyers all find reason to sit.

Professor Alexander Flint is one of the celebrities London’s learned and technical world has made of its own. The capital names him alongside Professor George Hatherley, who lectures on antique mechanics and pre-Apocalypse instruments, and Professor Vale, who reads ruined chapels and old route shrines as a layered commentary on the city. Flint’s field is metal. He stands where foundry practice meets antiquarian metallurgy, joining the working knowledge of the furnace to the study of what older ages made and left behind.

That meeting point is the source of his standing. Collectors, engineers and Crown buyers all have reason to court his table, which makes it a place where antiquarian curiosity, working industry and the Crown’s purse sit down together. A company that comes back from old ground with metal of uncertain age or making would find his opinion worth having, and would soon learn that the other parties interested in the piece want that opinion as well.

In person

Alexander Flint is very tall, about six foot three, and extremely broad and powerful, in his early fifties. His iron-grey hair is cropped very short, and he wears a long beard and moustache. His face is broad, square and weathered, with a broken nose and steel-grey eyes behind glasses, and burn scars mark his cheek, his left forearm and his hand. He dresses in heavy, practical foundry clothing and is most at home among furnace, metal samples, metallurgical instruments and office papers.