The photographs above show a pair of old weaver’s temples, found last year in the museum stores at Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse in Norfolk. They were amongst a largely uncatalogued collection of artefacts from the linen weaving village of North Lopham, and were tangled in the harness of a dismantled jacquard loom. Nowadays, handloom weavers … Continue reading Old Weaver’s Temples
Earlier this year I made a working copy of an old bobbin winder that once belonged to the linen weavers of Lopham in Norfolk. The winder was gifted to Thetford Museum in 1926 by Albert Tyler, the last of the Lopham weavers, and is now in the collection of Norfolk Museums at Gressenhall. This post … Continue reading Time machine: a working reconstruction of a Norfolk bobbin winder
I recently returned to Bankfield Museum in Halifax to make a detailed inspection of a set of heddles from the old loom from North Lopham that I first visited in 2023. It is an unusual loom – almost nine feet wide and fitted with a witch engine operating twenty leaves of heddles. By analysing the … Continue reading The Bankfield Heddles
This is an analysis of a set of weaver’s heddles used to make huckaback linen in Lopham, Norfolk, probably 1900 – 1930. Last year I visited Norfolk Museum Services’ storage facility at Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse in search of an old loom from North Lopham. The loom was there, dismantled, the big wooden timbers piled … Continue reading Handmade Clasped Heddles from Lopham in Norfolk
A newspaper article about the linen industry of North & South Lopham, by F. J. Higginbottom, from the Eastern Daily Press, 14th April 1936. I found this article in two parts – the photographs in one archive and the text in another. The newspaper cutting with the photographs of ‘The Old Lopham Loom’ and the … Continue reading “The Ancient Weaving Trade in Norfolk”
This post is about a ‘putting-out’ ledger recording work by linen weavers in the employ of T. W. & J. Buckenham in the village of North Lopham, Norfolk, between 1876 and 1911. The ledger is in the collection of Norfolk Museums at Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse / Museum of Norfolk Life (ref GRSRM: 1988.50.1). I … Continue reading The Buckenham Ledger
An extract about the linen weaving village of North Lopham from the Report of the Parliamentary Commission on Hand-Loom Weavers (1840). . . The photograph above was taken about 75 years after Assistant Commisioner James Mitchell visited North Lopham in 1839, but the view down The Street had probably changed little. Elsewhere in Britain the … Continue reading “One Green Oasis”