For the Love of Lace: A Look into London’s Anti-Capitalist DIY Communities

Image credit: Coco Wu

It’s a Sunday morning in November, but the door to Kentish Town’s Torriano Meeting House is open. Inside, two dozen twenty-somethings sit elbow to elbow. Sprawled across two tables, they are stationed behind large cushions and squeezed in between sacks of thread and piles of pins, carefully rearranging a dizzying number of jangling wooden bobbins.

This is the youngest group of lacemakers in the country, the London Lace Club. They meet every fortnight, under the watchful eyes of tutors and co-founders Lauren Watson and Amelia White, to learn bobbin lacemaking. In doing so, they are reviving an art form facing extinction.

Modern forms of learning can’t be applied to lace. ‘It’s just too complicated to pick up from a book or a YouTube video’.

It’s a difficult craft. To start a new piece, pins are placed in a firm cushion, securing strands of thread looped through a bobbin (a finger length stick of carved wood, and sometimes bone, which ends in a ring of anchoring beads). For the simplest of patterns, a mere ten pairs of bobbins are required; but this number can extend well into the hundreds for the seasoned artisan. These instruments must then be deftly manoeuvred across one another to braid and twist the thread, with pins sprouting from the cushion to secure the strings in place. Et voilà: you have lace – an intricate, time-consuming labour of love which requires the application of more than a few brain cells.

For the simplest of patterns, a mere ten pairs of bobbins are required; but this number can extend well into the hundreds (image credit: Coco Wu)

Uniquely, modern forms of learning can’t be applied to lace. ‘It’s just too complicated to pick up from a book or a YouTube video’, explains Lauren. ‘It has to be done in a group setting – you need other people to guide you, or to help inspect where you went wrong’. Her co-founder, Amelia, adds, ‘There’s something romantic about the storing of information over time and finding ways to tap into it’.

Lacemaking rejects isolation – it has an oral tradition, with knowledge passed down through the generations. As such, natural variations in style germinated in different areas of the country. Honiton, Bucks Point and Bedfordshire lace (from Devon, Buckinghamshire and, as the name suggests, Bedfordshire, respectively), are all distinctly original, but are united by a shared genesis in 16th century Kent.

Bobbin lacemakers have had an undulating history: it was a hard living, and they were virtually wiped out during the industrial revolution. But efforts to preserve the artform spiked with the DIY renaissance of the 70s – groups, some hundreds of members strong, sprung up across the country.

An example of fine Honiton lace, from The Honiton Lace Book (1875)

‘Some of these groups have now, quite literally, died out’, said Amelia. Throughout its history, lacemaking was seen as a provincial craft; a quick Google search throws up images of craftsmen and women working in village doorways. Zone 2 of our capital, in all its yuppy and gentrified glory, seems a peculiar place for a craft revival.

While it was never made in central London, in the 17th century this was the epicentre of the lace trade, and shops on the Strand sold scalloped trims of latticed silver and gold to society’s elite. Two centuries later, and bobbin lacemaking, having gone virtually extinct as a profession, was resurrected and repackaged as an artform.

In their Baker Street studio, the Yorkshire-born Tebbf sisters constructed pieces displayed at a 1906 exhibition, sponsored by the Daily Mail, which sought to highlight the striking contrast between the lives of working women, and those who consumed fashion.

Two decades later, cellist, nurse and lace-maker Ethel Nettleship brought the craft into the 20th century: ‘She reinvented the craft’, said Ann Day, curator and teacher at the Lace Guild. ‘She established a new method of teaching, focused on design, as well as technique: she opened the door of possibility to what one could make’.

A young lace-maker practises her craft outside, in 1895

It was in Soho where Ann first picked up a pair of bobbins, during the craft hey-day of the 70s: ‘there were these new polystyrene pillows, which were far more lightweight and portable, meaning you could carry everything you needed to make lace with you on the tube’. The woman who taught her was a pupil of Ethel’s, meaning Ann is practically the granddaughter of modern lace. 

‘In the city you’re on a constant conveyor belt of manufacturing and output, but lace, in its very essence, provides an escapism from money and capitalism’.

It is in this vein that lacemaking has continued. Amelia and Lauren of London Lace Club, for example, travel to the Downs every other month to meet a lady who bestows wisdom from the lace world over cheesy jacket potatoes. The pair then return to London, with full bellies and brains.

For Lauren, the absence of monetary value to lacemaking is ‘liberating’.  Amelia concurrs: ‘in the city you’re on a constant conveyor belt of manufacturing and output, but lace, in its very essence, provides an escapism from money and capitalism’.

London Lace Club, the country’s youngest lace group, at work during their weekly meetings in Kentish Town (image credit: Coco Wu)

The London Lace Club founders are both art graduates, who have begun their careers working for fashion designers. For them, lacemaking forces reflection on value and worth – it’s not about making money off something. What they get is far more valuable; it’s an activity rich in process, learning, and enjoyment.

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In South East suburbia, the Eltham Lacemakers meet every week. The band of a dozen are taught by seasoned artisan Margaret Vick, who fell rapidly in love with lacemaking upon discovering that it ‘stops me thinking about other things.’

‘I’m a lacemaker. Not a hobbyist. Anyone can be a hobbyist – you can qualify for that title just by sticking a nail in a piece of wood,’ Margaret asserts. However, she has no interest in selling her art. ‘I was once at a community event with the lace group and we were displaying work we had made. A man offered me £25 for a fan that took me three months to make.’ Safe to say, this bidder left empty handed.

A heart made at London Lace Club (image credit: Coco Wu)

‘Meditation and community’ are the cherished core of London’s lacemaking coterie. Margaret describes the Eltham Lacemakers as a ‘mixed bunch’. Most women, but there’s a man who occasionally swings by.

One attendee is partially sighted, with a guide dog, and another has a disability which affects her hands. The group fashioned her a unique device which enables her to find and move the right bobbins, ‘it’s like a token of love, really,’ Margaret says, ‘and a demonstration of the love for the craft, the love of passing on knowledge, and the love we have for each other’.