Riddings Community
Flax Project

A Heritage Crop In A Front Garden

The starting point was a walk through Waingroves Community Woodland and its historic ropewalk. Hearing that ropes were likely made there for the local pits sent me back into the textile knowledge I had first encountered through my degree and my own family history of weaving. I began looking more closely at flax and hemp as fibres connected with rope making, linen and industrial production, and then at the much larger local story.

Research led me towards the rope making history of Waingroves, Somercotes Flax Croft and the British Hemp and Flax Development Company in Ripley. The more I looked, the clearer it became that flax had once been woven through the working life of Amber Valley but had largely disappeared from everyday memory. Growing it again, even on a tiny scale, offered a way to bring that history back into view through touch, conversation and making rather than interpretation alone.

I have documented the practical learning openly, including what happened when flax met difficult Derbyshire soil. My How To Grow Flax At Home writing grew directly from this process of learning in public rather than pretending I already knew all the answers.

Growing, Processing & Making Together

The project follows the rhythm of the plant. Seeds are shared and sown, plants are watched and weeded, flax is pulled rather than cut, then retted, dried and processed by hand. Each stage creates a different reason for people to stop, ask questions, join in or share what they know. Some people have grown flax in gardens, allotments, pots and buckets. Others have become involved through processing, rope making, exhibitions, talks or simply conversations over a garden wall.

Working through more than one growing season has been important. The first crop showed what was possible in the front garden and the 2025 harvest allowed the project to move further into processing and making. Bruised stems that might easily have been treated as waste became material for tiny stitched flax baskets, while longer stems continued through breaking, scutching and hackling towards fibre. Imperfection has become useful information rather than failure.

Community Knowledge & Creative Listening

This is not a project built around everybody completing the same workshop. Participation can be very small or much deeper. Someone might take seed home, stop for a five minute conversation, help with a stage of processing, share a family memory or return repeatedly across the season. That flexibility matters because it allows the work to sit around real lives rather than asking people to fit themselves around an arts programme.

Creative listening is central to the way the project develops. I am interested in who is already taking part, who is missing, what people are curious about and what knowledge already exists locally. The project has gradually grown through neighbours, growers, heritage conversations, community events and people who simply want to understand how a green stem becomes fibre. My wider approach to community textile practice and the place of flax within it is also described in my Arts Derbyshire artist profile.

Environmental Practice & Material Learning

Flax has also become a way of testing what carbon sensitive textile practice can look like at a very local scale. I try to use what is already available, share tools where possible and learn from the whole plant rather than valuing only perfect fibre. Growing close to home reduces travel, makes the work visible and creates opportunities for informal participation that do not depend on buying materials or entering a formal arts space.

The project keeps returning me to the relationship between heritage and future making. Historic techniques matter, but I am not trying to recreate the past unchanged. I am interested in what these fibres can teach us now about patience, resourcefulness, land, labour and the value of knowing where materials come from.

From Riddings To Beneath Our Feet

The research and relationships developed through Riddings became the foundation for Beneath Our Feet, which took the Derbyshire flax story into a wider participatory heritage and exhibition context. The two projects remain connected, but they do different jobs: Riddings is the long, seasonal growing and learning process, while Beneath Our Feet creates a public space for sharing the industrial history, stories and material discoveries that have emerged from it.

That local history has continued to widen through talks and research, including my work around the Museum of Making and Derbyshire flax heritage. Riddings is now in its third year and continues to change as the crop, the skills and the community relationships develop. The point is not to arrive at a perfect flax product. It is to keep growing knowledge, connection and confidence around a material that once mattered enormously here and could still have something useful to say about how we make together now.