VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
This paper will address the intangible heritage of Nottingham lace manufacturing and the impact of globalization. The machine-made lace industry began in Nottingham at the beginning of the 19th century and, despite government prohibition, was soon established in France and later around the globe. Nottingham not only exported lace fabric but also the machines on which it was made and the skilled technologists who operated the machines migrated with the ever-expanding industry. Nottingham’s expertise ensured its world-wide dominance of machine-made lace manufacturing well into the 20th century and the success of lace manufacturers, machine makers and skilled workers across the region. The emergence of new lace making technologies began to threaten Nottingham’s dominance in the mid 20th century. These new technologies offered: design diversity; manufacturing efficiencies; increased responsiveness and flexibility alongside a shift in centres of production, mainly to Asia. As a result, de-industrialisation began to impact on Nottingham. Initially this produced a decline in manufacturing but eventually led to the closure of businesses, resulting in machines being sold to international competitors. Employees were engaged in decommissioning machines in Nottingham for relocation and to train workers in businesses outside of the UK. The loss of Nottingham’s global lace industry left communities bereft of both their livelihoods and identities and forced to shift their sense of community cohesion to focus on its textile heritage. The period of decline, since 1980, will be considered through local newspaper reports and oral histories from those who shared their experiences via Textile Tales https://www.textiletales.co.uk/ .
Professor Amanda Briggs-Goode is Head of Department of Fashion, Textiles, Knitwear Design and Director of the Fashion and Textile Research Centre in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research interests are in archives and textile heritage with a focus on the NTU Lace Archive. Briggs-Goode has exhibited and edited widely including: Crafting Anatomies: archives, dialogues, fabrications published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Having co-organised a season of city wide events called Lace:Here:Now Recently she completed a funded research project Textile Tales.
Tonya Outtram is currently a Doctoral candidate at NTU on a research project ‘Challenging the de-industrialisation narrative: East Midlands textile workers 1980-2005 ‘and was previously the Research Fellow on the ‘Textile Tales Project’. She has presented work on oral histories, and textile heritage widely. She also worked on Textiles Unravelled with Nottingham Castle and has worked as a curator and archivist.
Dr Gail Baxter is the Lace Archive Research Fellow at NTU. Baxter has a wide range of research interests relating to Nottingham lace heritage and its economic, social and technical importance. She is particularly concerned to uncover and preserve the tacit knowledge contained within the Lace Archive and an area of key interest is the training of lace designers. She has undertaken research into the wider importance of the plain net industry which provided the base for other forms of lace including embroidery and applique on net. Her current research focus is on the introduction of colour to machine-made lace.
Jayne Childs is Research Assistant in the NTU Lace Archive. Her research interests include machine-embroidered lace, text insertions and the use of machines for making lace. She is currently writing a chapter ‘Machine-Embroidered Laces’ for Bloomsbury’s Encyclopaedia of World Textiles due to be published in 2023. As a creative practitioner making contemporary machine-embroidered lace working under the name JC Middlebrook since 2010. She has exhibited her lace and artworks in the UK, Paris, Karlsruhe and New York. Childs is a Fellow of Design-Nation and co-created international opportunities for over 30 artists and makers as part of Creative Twinning.
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Friday 30th June, 2023