The linen renaissance

A field in urban Blackburn could be the start of a fashion revolution, according to Patrick Grant of BBC series The Great British Sewing Bee. He wants to revive Britain’s once-great linen industry – and help save the planet

Words: Margaret Bartlett

Delicate violet-blue blooms nod and sway in the breeze atop slender emerald-green stalks of flax on a hazy June day. The gentle rumble and whirr of wooden spinning wheels floats on the air as a small group sits beside the field turning flax fibres into linen yarn, ready to be woven into homegrown cloth.

This is no bucolic rural scene from the 18th century, but 2021 in the heart of Blackburn, and the beginning of a potentially revolutionary fashion project. In a bid to reduce the huge carbon footprint of fashion, the Homegrown/Homespun project aims to regenerate linen production in Britain – an industry that has been dormant since the 1950s.

SEEDS OF CHANGE

Work started in April last year, when an enthusiastic team of around 30 volunteers gathered to clear years’ worth of fly-tipped rubbish from a small disused field beside the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. They tilled the soil and sowed seeds of flax and woad –a plant used for making blue dye. In June, when the green shoots were reaching skywards, a group gathered on the edge of the field to learn how to spin flax fibres, then how to create indigo dye from the woad.

Among the workers in the field was a familiar face: The Great British Sewing Beejudge and fashion designer Patrick Grant. A driving force behind Homegrown/Homespun, Patrick is also the founder of Community Clothing –a social enterprise creating affordable, sustainable clothing manufactured in the UK (communityclothing.co.uk). The first threads of the project were spun during conversations between Patrick and Justine Aldersey-Williams, a botanical textile dyer. Friends since meeting on Liverpool’s fashion scene in the 1990s, the pair share a passion for repairing the link between local agriculture and the clothes we wear, both striving to create a climate positive fabric industry in the UK, from seed to sewing. In early 2020, Justine also started the north-west England branch of Fibreshed, a regional community of textile growers, makers and educators who work sustainably.

“The clothing industry really has this huge potential to remedy the climate crisis,” says Justine. “If you start growing, rather than extracting fibres using fossil fuels, you can be a massive force for good. Patrick and I had a conversation where I suggested a collaboration and we came up with a plan to grow fibre and dye,” she adds. They soon stitched together Homegrown/Homespun –a collaboration between Patrick’s Community Clothing, North-West England Fibreshed and the Super Slow Way, a cultural development programme working in a 20-mile corridor around the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Super Slow Way found a suitable site with the support of Blackburn Council, then leafleted the neighbourhood to ask for volunteers.

WORKING TOGETHER

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, Justine says being outdoors with others, working towards a shared goal, created a hugely positive vibe and attracted committed helpers. And help was needed, as every step was done by hand; making enough yarn for just one length of cloth involved 70 hours of hand-spinning. “The story of what we’re doing really captured everyone’s hearts and minds, because it does feel very hopeful,” says Justine. “It really feels like we’ve got a chance to turn things around.” Patrick adds:

“We probably had in excess of 100 volunteers over the course of sowing, growing, pulling, processing etc. They loved it, I loved it, Justine loved it.”

In mid-August, the volunteers gathered to pull up the flax and lay it in the field for retting, the first process in preparing the fibres for spinning (see box opposite). The crop was then placed in upright bundles, called stooks, to dry. From only five kilos of seed, 96 stooks were harvested. Some were sent to Flaxland – artisan linenmakers in Stroud, Gloucestershire – for further processing: breaking, scutching and hackling.

It was an emotional moment when Justine finally held the woad-dyed linen cloth in her hands, ready to go on display at last October’s British Textile Biennial –a festival of UK fabric and clothing production coordinated by the Super Slow Way. By the time of the next biennial in 2023, Patrick hopes Community Clothing will be able to sell completed garments: jeans made from Homegrown/Homespun linen.

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SPACE TO GROW

While they will need more than small plots to grow enough flax for the commercial production of jeans, transforming disused urban land will remain a cornerstone of the project.

Involving city communities in creating textiles is a vital step in the process of encouraging more sustainable clothes buying habits, explains Patrick. “We think it’s important people understand how all this stuff works, and the educational benefit of doing it in an urban setting is pretty extraordinary. Also, we are taking bits of land that are not being cared for and, hopefully, by the intervention of some well thought through agricultural work, we can increase the carbon-capture value of that land, increase biodiversity and create green spaces in urban environments.”

Don’t miss See Patrick Grant in the new series of TheGreat British Sewing Bee on BBC One this spring.

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“What we’re doing really captured hearts and minds; it does feel very hopeful”

Meanwhile, the hunt for growing space continues. “We are looking for land in all sorts of places, but most of our immediate work is focused on the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which was the central artery that ran through the UK’s textile country,” says Patrick.

Flax is a crop well-suited to the British climate and soils, needing little intervention or irrigation. But to progress to a commercial scale, Homegrown/Homespun is appealing for help from farmers working regeneratively, with a focus on soil health. “With the exception of Justine and the plant dyeing, we are amateurs in this stuff , and we want people to come forward and help us do this in a state-of-the-art way,” explains Patrick, “We’ve had farmers, agri-consultants and agricultural colleges approach us, too.”

Turning flax into linen is a skilled, lengthy process that, in the UK, needs to be done by hand; the last flax processing machinery was decommissioned in the 1950s (see box, page 68). Until a manufacturing infrastructure is set up, this means the garments will be pricey, so educating the public on the environmental benefits of linen is crucial, adds Patrick. “Denim made from linen will last considerably longer, because linen fibre has higher tensile strength, it has greater abrasion resistance, it’s a much stronger fibre. But, also, we have to get people back to the idea that clothes are things we want to keep for a very long time, and this is a fabric that allows us to do that.”

But is the British public ready to give up those £5 T-shirts? Patrick is adamant that to combat the climate crisis, we must consume less. “Last year, we bought 100 billion items of clothing in the world, 70% of which is made from fossil fuels.” Synthetic textile dyes are derived from coal tar and petroleum, so growing native woad and other dye plants beside the flax is a vital element. “Yes, [woad] is more expensive; yes, it is more di cult. That is actually its virtue,” says Justine.

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“It is speed of manufacturing and convenience that’s causing a lot of waste that we see today, so there’s a great value to slowing down.”

Patrick believes Homegrown/ Homespun is the first step towards a small-scale system of high-quality local cloth production. “I think, with a fair wind, five, 10 years from now we might have something that looks like a sustainable long-term industry.”

Justine concurs: “I imagine in five to 10 years sitting here wearing something that has been grown by Community Clothing, with this sense of relief you would feel to know it’s going to be okay… we have figured out that we can grow clothing in a way that is beneficial to people and the planet.” ^CF

HOW FLAX IS TURNED INTO LINEN

1. Sowing:
flax seeds are sown in March or April, and the blue blooms appear in June when the plant is around one metre tall.

2. Harvest or ‘pulling’:
100 days after sowing, the flax plants are pulled up by the roots to preserve the length of the fibres in the stem. Retting (step 4) is sometimes done in the field straight away, or the plants are placed into stooks to dry out.

3. Rippling:
the seeds are removed from the stems. A bundle of flax is pulled through nails in a board, like a comb, and the seeds are collected below.

4. Retting:
the flax is laid in the field and left for weeks for dew and rain to rot the lignins and pectins in the stalks, making it easier to release the inner fibres. It’s then placed in stooks to dry.

5. Breaking and scutching:
the breaking machine’s wooden blades break up the woody flax stalk to separate it from the inner fibres. The broken fragments – called shives – fall to the ground, leaving fibre behind.

6. Hackling:
flax is pulled through several combs or hackles to remove the straw; hackles with nails closer together polish and split the fibres. It’s cleaned and is now supple, ready for spinning.

7. Spinning:
the fibres are spun on a wheel to create yarn.

8. Weaving:
the yarn is woven on looms to create fabric, in the same way as wool.

TAKE PART

• Want to get involved in Homegrown/Homespun? Email Uzma Raziq: uzma@superslowway.org.uk

• Learn how to process flax into linen on a workshop at Flaxland Natural Fibres. flaxland.co.uk

• Learn how to dye textiles: NaturalFabricDyeing.com

THE STORY OF AN ANCIENT FABRIC

Archaeological finds of spun flax fibres, dated at over 30,000 years old, show that flax – Linum usitatissimum (‘line most useful’) – was one of the first plants used to make textiles. The ancient Egyptians grew flax on a large scale, using linen for sails, clothes and mummification. There’s some dispute as to whether it was Phoenician traders who first introduced linen to Britain, around 900BCE, or the Romans. The Roman invaders certainly built linen factories here to supply their troops. Throughout early modern England, flax growing and processing was a large part of agricultural life. By Tudor times, flax growing was on such a vast scale that Parliament outlawed the retting of flax in rivers to protect aquatic life. In the late 17th century, new water-powered mills made some aspects of flax processing more efficient and Ireland became a powerhouse of linen production. From 1750, the production of cotton cloth – using raw material imported from plantations worked by slaves – started to replace wool and linen. In the early 1800s, cheaper cotton products lead to the slow demise of the linen industry. The global price for flax plummeted after the Second World War; in 1957, the remaining linen mills were closed and the last flax-processing equipment in the British Isles was decommissioned.

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Margaret Bartlett is production editor of BBC Countryfile Magazine.

Photos: Craig Easton, Bea Davidson, Getty,Alamy