Some updates from me on progress in the Textiles strand over the past couple of weeks!

Rosie Freeman

On 8th Feb Alex F. and I met with Rose Freeman (formerly of Brick Box), who explained her plans to follow up on the successful ‘The Mills are Alive’ project going forward, including through Bradford 2025 and through Arts Council funding bids. Rosie shared with us her plans for the ‘Almanac’ series, which will stage a series of events that focus on seasonal changes around the year, focussing on peoples’ experiences of Bradford through an environmental lens. I suggested that some of our work on lists and ontologies, as well as the (to be proposed) investigation on water pollution might tie in well with this project. Rosie said that she would be interested in receiving help with R&D work for Arts Council bids, as well as the idea of some kind of event/training for creatives on copyright and re-use of visual and moving image works.

National Wool Museum metadata

Image of finishing machinery from National Museum, Wales (http://www.photographers-resource.co.uk/a_heritage/Living_History/LG/Nat_Wool_Museum.htm)

This Monday, met with Sally Carter from Amgueddfa Cymru/Museum Wales, to discuss a potential metadata extraction relating to the National Wool Museum, which is part of AC. Sally is actually in the process of amalgamating the Wool Museum’s collections into the general AC catalogue, so in a sense we’ve caught them at the right time to isolate the metadata on wool. Sally (and subsequently Arran!) have really made we want to visit the Wool Museum’s site in Drefach, which still has a working mill!

The idea with this metadata is that it will contribute in several ways to a number of different investigations. I’m hoping that I can draw on it in time for the geospatial workshop later this week, and I also believe it will be a useful resource to further pursue the links between the UK textiles industry and colonialism, which so far has been a big part of Will Ashworth’s work on the Greg family.

Arran directed me to the work of the historian Chris Evans, who has done a tremendous amount of work on the Welsh connection to Atlantic slavery, and has produced a public-facing ebook on Welsh Wool and slavery. Of particular interest to us is the trade in cheap ‘Welsh cottons’ (actually wool!) which were sold to plantation owners to clothe enslaved people, and were in competition with the ‘penistones’ produced in Yorkshire. This directed me to the recent work by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution who argue strongly that major changes in the Yorkshire textile industry in the eighteenth century were driven to a great extent by demand from Atlantic markets in the US and West Africa. In their words: ‘The bulk of output in this major industry went to Atlantic markets’.

The Wool Museum metadata arrived in my inbox on Thursday morning – I have not yet had the chance to dig into it in detail, but will hopefully be able to delve into it in more detail in my update next week. I can say already however, that there are multiple references to West Yorkshire in the over 6,000 records, and also some very helpful taxonomic info on woollens that will contribute to the ontologies work.

Friends of Bradford’s Becks

On Thursday Tasha, Arran and I had a really fascinating conversation with Ron Hellawell, from Friends of Bradford’s Becks (unfortunately the group’s chair, Barney Lerner, was unable to join this time!). Below is a brief summary of our discussion:

• FoBB have undertaken a wide range of activities aimed at improving the water quality of Bradford Beck, and much of this is centred on improving public awareness about the existence of the Beck, and its current levels of pollution. They believe that it is easy for many people to ignore this pollution because of the fact that the river is buried under the city - much of their work has therefore involved raising the Beck's visibility through the installation of plaques, public events, and plans to install daylighting in the city to remind people of the Beck's presence.
• Rob is now working part-time on a three-year project with the Aire Rivers Trust which aims to find solutions to the problems of pollution in Bradford, funded through the Polluter Pays Principle.
• After a catastrophic pollution event in 2018, Yorkshire Water funded a detailed year-long study into the state of the river, which they shared with FoBB. The problem is that these datasets are so large that they have been unable to do much with them, but Rob is particularly keen of finding some way of visualising this data. Tasha suggested that CE might be able to work with a small sample of this data to demonstrate what can be done with it.
• One of Rob's aims is to understand exactly where all the tributaries and culverts of the Beck have been buried, in order to locate current sources of pollution. He has already worked with the NLS to identify the river's course from old maps, and we identified further work of this kind as a potential area for collaboration.
• FoBB are thinking ahead towards Bradford 2025, including organising a repeat of their Festival of the Becks. We discussed potential collaborations on this, including for example a public event on the history of river pollution in Bradford and how this connects to the present situation.
• We agreed to arrange a future meeting, hopefully joined withBarney, once we have had the chance to explore any shared datasets, alongside historic data collected by myself and Tasha.