Riddings Community Flax Project

How The Riddings Flax Story Began

The project began with a fairly ordinary question: what would happen if I tried to grow fibre flax in my own front garden? I had become increasingly interested in flax as both a material and a way into wider questions about making, land, labour and textile history. Growing it at home made those questions immediate. The crop was no longer something I was reading about or seeing in a museum. It was pushing up through Derbyshire soil outside my front door, affected by weather, clay, passing feet, cars and all the other interruptions of an ordinary domestic garden.

As I looked more closely at the area around Riddings, the flax began to connect with stories that were already here. Research into local rope making, the ropewalk at Waingroves, references to Flax Croft at Somercotes and the former wartime flax factory at Ripley gradually broadened the project. These were not neat pieces of history sitting separately from the growing. They changed the way I looked at the plant itself. A stem in my hand could connect a front garden crop with industrial production, local employment, rope, linen and memories that still surface in conversations.

From Seed To Connection

Very early on, I realised I was less interested in keeping the flax as my own private experiment than in seeing what happened when it was shared. Seed became one of the simplest ways of doing that. Small handmade seed packs could move from one person to another with very little instruction attached. Some people planted them, some passed them on, some came back with questions, and some simply remembered the encounter.

Over time, the seed travelled beyond the people and places I had originally imagined. I began recording postcodes, not because I wanted to measure success by how far the project had spread, but because the seed's movement was beginning to reveal something about the relationships forming around it. People encountered the project through conversations, community events, talks, growing, online information and other people. Family memories surfaced. Growers found one another. People became curious about a plant they had previously known only as linen, linseed or perhaps not at all.

I had originally imagined connection as something quite local and visible, almost like a trail between neighbouring houses. Looking back, the trail was there, but it had taken a different form. It was a network made through people, stories, places and small acts of passing something on.

Flax, Place & Derbyshire Heritage

The historical part of the project has developed alongside the community growing rather than sitting behind it as background research. Conversations about flax often quickly lead to questions about where materials come from, who processed them, what kinds of work disappeared, and what traces remain in a place after an industry has gone.

That has made Derbyshire flax heritage an important strand of the work. The former flax factory at Ripley, local rope making and other fragments of textile and industrial history give the contemporary growing a different weight. At the same time, I do not want the project to become an exercise in nostalgia or reconstruction. I am interested in what these histories might help us notice now: our distance from the materials we use, the knowledge contained in practical processes, and the relationships among landscape, labour, community and cloth.

Museum collections and conversations with people who hold specialist knowledge have also extended this enquiry. Historic linen, rope, technical textiles and flax objects show how adaptable the fibre once was. Bringing those histories back into contact with a handful of flax grown in a front garden makes the scale of that material story feel both enormous and very personal.

Growing, Processing & Making Together

Flax does not become fibre easily. The journey from seed to something that can be spun or made with involves a series of slow physical transformations: growing, pulling, drying, rippling, retting, breaking, scutching and hackling. For many people, the surprising moment comes when a hard, dry stem is broken open and soft fibre appears inside it.

Those transformations have become important points of participation. Not everybody needs to grow a full crop or learn every stage of the process. Someone might crack a stem for the first time, twist a little fibre into cordage, take seed home, handle retted flax or simply ask a question that changes the conversation. I am interested in participation that can occur at different levels rather than requiring everyone to make the same commitment.

The making continues to develop from the material itself. Flax that is bruised, short, tangled or otherwise imperfect is not automatically waste. It can become cordage, small baskets, experiments in spinning or material for another enquiry. That willingness to work with what the crop actually produces has become part of the project. Growing a natural fibre makes control impossible, and that uncertainty has gradually become something I value rather than something to overcome.

What The Project Is Exploring

The Riddings Community Flax Project is now less about producing a perfect crop than about what can gather around one. Flax gives the project something physical that people can hold, plant, break apart, spin, remember and pass on. It allows conversations about textile history to sit beside questions about soil, sustainability, local knowledge, making and community without forcing those subjects into separate boxes.

I am particularly interested in what happens when an artist begins with an invitation rather than a predetermined outcome. A packet of seed does not tell somebody exactly how to participate. Neither does a handful of flax fibre. People bring their own memories, curiosity, skills and reasons for becoming involved, and those responses gradually alter the direction of the work.

The project has been growing since 2024, and I expect its form to keep changing. What I want to preserve is the openness at its centre: flax as a material through which connections can emerge between people, place and history, and a project that can develop slowly enough for those relationships to matter.