Joshua Habgood-Coote writes:

In the 18th century, the streets of East London were filled with flowers. Fuchsias, auriculas and star-of-Bethlehem grew from the window boxes of tall terraced houses. And tulips and dahlias sprouted from the narrow allotments kept by local silk weavers, who often tended to their gardens on Mondays. But as mechanical looms took over, and the weavers were forced to work long hours in factories to earn a living, there was little time left for growing flowers.

In 1795, John Thelwall, the son of a silk mercer, wrote about his memories of the weavers’ gardens:

I remember the time, myself, when a man who was a tolerable workman in the fields, had generally, beside the apartment in which he carried on his vocation, a small summer house and a narrow slip of a garden, at the outskirts of the town, where he spent his Monday, either in flying his pidgeons, or raising his tulips. But those gardens are now fallen into decay. The little summer-house and the Monday’s recreation are no more; and you will find the poor weavers and their families crowded together in vile, filthy and unwholesome chambers, destitute of the most common comforts, and even of the common necessaries of life.

Like many others, Thelwall was nostalgic for a lost way of life. The historian E P Thompson notes that almost all writing about cloth workers in the 19th century is ‘haunted by the legend of better days’. And, like many others, Thelwall used the flowers that artisans had grown (and then woven into their patterns) as a symbol of that loss. ‘Weavers,’ the historian Robin Veder writes, ‘mourned the flowers as stand-ins for lost artisanal work culture.’ We might say that Thelwall was in the grip of skill nostalgia. [Continue reading…]