Beneath Our
Feet

Following The Flax Back To Ripley

Growing flax in my front garden in Riddings had already made me look at the surrounding landscape differently. Once I began following those threads further, I kept finding traces of flax much closer to home than I had expected. There was Somercotes Flax Common, the old ropewalk at Waingroves and, most intriguing of all, the remains of the British Hemp & Flax Development Company Limited site at Ripley (aka the Ripley Flax Factory.)

The Ripley factory opened up a much bigger story. During and after the Second World War, flax growing and processing connected farms, workers, families and villages across Amber Valley, yet surprisingly little of that history is now easy to find. Records are scattered, buildings have changed, and much of the story survives in fragments. I began piecing those fragments together through maps, newspapers, archives and conversations with local people. One resident remembered the smell of retting flax travelling through the streets. Details like that brought industrial history back into everyday life and made me want to find ways for other people to encounter it, too.

From Research To Gallery

Beneath Our Feet became my response to that research for VAA OpenSpaces in Alfreton. Rather than trying to turn the history into a neat display of facts, I wanted people to meet it through the material itself. Flax, small baskets, images, and research fragments created a space where the story could be touched as well as read.

People gathered around the table, picked up the flax and began asking questions. Those conversations mattered as much as anything I had put on the wall. Someone might recognise a place name, remember a family connection or simply be surprised that flax had once been grown and processed so close to where they lived. The project began to feel less like uncovering a lost history on my own and more like opening it up so that other people could add their own knowledge, curiosity and memories.

Could Flax Connect A Community?

At the centre of Beneath Our Feet was a much simpler question: could flax connect a community? As Maker in Residence with the University of Derby, I wanted to make a genuinely arms length and wholly inclusive offering, without workshops, applications or expectations about what participation should look like. I began very close to home, offering seven small boxes of flax seed to my immediate neighbours in Riddings and then watching what happened.

The seed travelled through letterboxes, across garden fences, and into other people's lives, creating reasons to talk, to compare what was growing, and to notice what was happening around us. I followed that small experiment as it unfolded. I documented the growing through my blog, while a series of practical videos offered simple instructions for what people could make from the flax once it had been harvested and processed.

The seven boxes became a way of testing whether an ordinary material, rooted in Derbyshire’s textile history, could create new relationships in the present.

Breaking Flax

Making Flax Cordage

Making A Flax Basket

Together, these films offered another way into the project, allowing people to follow the flax from plant to fibre and making without needing to be in the same place or take part in a workshop.

From Seven Boxes Outwards

The question did not stay with seven neighbours. Through Derbyshire Makes in Heanor and Bolsover, the project moved into public spaces where people could encounter flax without needing to sign up for a workshop or already know anything about textiles. Seed boxes were taken away, children and adults handled retted stems, fibres were pulled apart, and conversations opened up around what flax was, how it had once been used and why that history mattered in Derbyshire. I also collected the postcodes of the places the seeds were travelling to, creating a simple record of how far this small offering was beginning to spread.

The same enquiry travelled again when I was invited to speak at Derby Museums' Museum of Making. There, the story of flax connected the material in people's hands to Derbyshire's industrial past, including the Ripley flax factory and the broader history of local flax cultivation and processing. Seeds were given away again, bundles of flax travelled home with people, and the project continued to move through conversation, curiosity and small acts of participation.

What The Flax Carried

Beneath Our Feet began with flax, but the thing I kept returning to was connection. A box of seed could cross a garden fence, travel home from an event or begin a conversation between people who had never thought about Derbyshire's flax history before. Some people grew it, some handled the fibre, some stayed to talk, and others simply took seed away. There was room for all of those responses.

The project has changed how I think about participation. It does not always need to begin with bringing everyone into the same room or asking people to make the same thing. Sometimes an invitation can be small enough to fit in a seed box, with enough space around it for people to decide for themselves what happens next. That way of working now sits at the heart of my practice as a Derbyshire textile artist, where flax, local history and community participation continue to shape projects rooted in place.