Image credit: West of England (Greenpark Productions / Central Office of Information, 1951)

There is a wonderful short film made in 1951 called West of England that presents a romanticised, technicolour view of our valleys and includes many locations that those who live here will still recognise. Scripted by none other than Laurie Lee, it’s a thinly veiled, soporific promo of Gloucestershire’s cloth industry to overseas markets and a sure benchmark of the value placed on it by the British government, which plugged and protected the industry fiercely over the years. The film affirms Stroud’s capability to produce “cloths of such strength, they’ll outlast the life of a man,” reliant on age-old “skills as continuous as the flow of water.”

The textile industry in Stroud stretches back centuries. A long illustrious history of fine cloth production has left a legacy which shaped the landscape and - some may say - mindset of these valleys irrevocably. Even now, it attracts internationally recognised textile artists to settle here and show their work - known for its excellence and innovation - at high profile exhibitions. At the industrial end of textile production, there is still a single factory left in the valleys which makes the green cloth you’ll find on the billiard tables of Monte Carlo and the yellow coverings of tennis balls at Wimbledon.

My own particular interest in Stroud’s textile industry dovetails with my academic and personal exploration of colonial countryside and legacies of empire. I first wrote about the textile industry when commissioned for the Wool and Water Festival in 2019. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, broadcloth was a major export from the Stroud valleys, fuelling the local economy, oiling the wheels of colonial expansion as a trade cloth and clothing the Redcoats that patrolled and enforced the rule of Empire. The handful of poems I wrote for the Festival turned out to be just the start of an absorbing journey into the past, an exploration of rural stories that speak to a truly national and global history that still shapes our lives today. Among them was ‘Stroudwater Navigation,’ made into a beautiful film by the Places of Poetry project.

When I visited Dunkirk Mill on a sunny mid-autumn day last year, scraping in just as they were shutting down for the winter, I was already knee-deep in research for a series of poems about broadcloth. So when the idea of a residency with Stroudwater Textile Trust was put to me, it seemed only natural to step up. In truth, my inner research nerd leapt at the opportunity to get in behind the scenes and, though lockdown has temporarily put paid to visiting any of the mills, the expertise and knowledge of the Trust’s board has been generously given and set me on my way.

I began my residency by picking up the red thread of Stroudwater scarlet in my poems. I’m currently tracing the blue lines of indigo across the globe with a series of poems, aware I’m already in my fourth month as resident and only just beginning to scratch the surface of such a rich and intriguing history.

At the same time as starting the residency, a keen genealogist friend casually offered to help me search my family tree and it is by total coincidence that I discovered I have some serious skin in this textile game with family reaching back to 1540s Yorkshire where my earliest known ancestor was a clothier. His descendants knitted stockings before moving to Nottingham's lace industry in the mid-1800s where they worked until war broke out in the mid-twentieth century and my paternal grandad served in the Navy, no doubt dressed in blue broadcloth.

And now, here am I in the West of England, Stroudwater Textile Trust poet in residence - a loose end of a long line, threading my way with words.