Back in March, I found myself a short walk from Bristol Temple Meads train station, in an area of newly developed housing, knocking on the door of a brick-built industrial unit. I was in the South West for a friend’s 40th birthday party, with a couple of hours to spare and had arranged to visit the Bristol Textile Quarter (BTQ) and to have a chat with their Studio Manager Saffron Darby.
BTQ was founded in 2014 by Emma Jane Hague (who also founded the South West Fibreshed network) in response to a need for a shared textile space in Bristol and a “curiosity around what could happen if there were a space in Bristol for textile and fashion like-minds to meet, connect and collaborate.”
It offers 14 studio spaces, as well as temporary memberships for people wanting to use the shared space and equipment. They also run workshops and hire space for people to run their own textile workshops.
Katie and I had been talking about the potential of a shared textile studio in the North East and were curious to see different examples of what this can look like. It’s funny writing this now (quite a few months after the visit) at a time when Katie and I are about to move into a studio together with someone else who is also working in textiles. We’re not at the level of BTQ as a shared textile studio facility, but it definitely feels like it’s a step in that direction.
So earlier this year, in the shelter of their large and bright studio, surrounded by textile equipment, I got to speak with Studio Manager Saffron Darby. Below are some extracts from this wandering conversation…
HK – How does the space work?
SD – This is the whole space! Everything you can see around you is what we’ve got. I’ll take you round. So if you were a prospective member, it works that we offer a monthly membership of £190 and with that membership, you would get your own set of keys, fob, you’d be inducted and you’d be able to have 24 / 7 access to the studio.
What makes us unique is that we have private desk spaces for you to do whatever you like….and then you’ve got this big communal workspace with pattern cutting tables and we offer pattern cutting paper…and we’ve got machinery – industrial straight stitch, overlockers, steam generator iron, and then quite a lot of people bring in their own machines as well. So you’ve got this much bigger space that you’re not necessarily paying for the square footage, and you’re not making a pattern out on your kitchen floor or trying to sew in the corner of a room where you’ve basically made some fort with all your fabrics.
You also get a little bit of storage, and you get the wifi and access to the printer and printer paper and ink and tea and coffee. And then we’ve got a meeting room you can hire out (it doesn’t cost any extra). We got a bit of investment when we were in lockdown, so I invested in some photographic equipment last year. I did a little survey to all our members and asked what would be the best thing / be most beneficial (to buy)? Do we need a camera etc? In the end we got some really good lighting and backdrops and people use their own smartphones. We spent more money on a moveable stand so you could essentially move it around.
This is an ever-changing space in as much as I am forever trying to work out what is the best version of itself.
HK – What are the practicalities of running a studio space and how do you run BTQ?
SD – …I run BTQ on a purely part time basis. We’re a community interest company so we are purely not on a profit and don’t want to have a profit, but also we need it to be viable. With a shared space….it can take up an awful lot of your time and if you’re running another business alongside, I think you’ve got to think about what you can take on that is not going to pull you in different directions…At the moment, because obviously everyones struggling, we’ve really noticed that with the uptake of people coming in. We were in such a brilliant place towards the end of last year. Two years post pandemic we were completely full, and then suddenly we’ve lost five or six members in the space of three months and suddenly feeling like this can tick along nicely by itself to flipping that and thinking how we engage people and bring people in. And if you’ve got family…just trying to give the time it needs….I’d love to spend five days a week on it and run many more community projects than I do…but you just can’t do it. Not to sound all doom and gloom about it all, but it’s just a reality. And if you’re trying to run a small business..I’m sure you find that a struggle to find the time to do that…
HK – yeah and it is always that really difficult balance with life and a job that you feel passionate about as well. That is interesting and that was one of my questions – the difficulties of doing this, alongside other great things…
SD – I feel so passionate about this space. I feel immensely lucky to have this space. And we’ve worked hard to keep this space. And I feel like it’s a really unique space in Bristol. Bristol’s amazing, in the same way I’m sure Newcastle is, in that there’s so much creativity going on. In little pockets all around there are artists studios, and they’re really thriving artist spaces, but there isn’t something that’s textiles based. So we do offer something different from other studios.
HK – So who works here?
SD – We’ve got weavers, we’ve got a fashion stylist who only works with second hand clothes. She does these brilliant things called style lock-ins where she works with thrift stores and she has a lock-in in the store. You buy a ticket and she styles up all these outfits for you from the store. So it’s really about rethinking how you buy second hand.
And we’ve got someone who is making their entire wardrobe – that’s her absolute solace. She’s a creative director in her own right but has slowly been teaching herself to make her own clothes and that’s her mindful practice. And we’ve got a knitwear designer here…there’s lots of different disciplines but all with the same outlook about trying to change the way that people perceive their clothes or fashion and trying to not be a throw away society.
HK – Could you say a little bit about BTQs connection to Fibershed?
SD – So Emma Hague founded BTQ back in 2014 and in 2015 she found out about the American fibershed movement and she became the first fibreshed affiliate in the UK. At that point it was super early days….obviously people talked about sustainability but not in the same way that they do now. And it feels like really in the last three to four years it’s really started to gain traction. (At the beginning) she had been running that alongside BTQ and she was doing another job entirely on the side. So (now) I’ve been managing BTQ and Emma now runs the South West England fibreshed. And there’s the North Fibreshed and South East etc. And they all kind of link up…that whole fibreshed movement is really exciting and there’s lots…as Katie (Pollard) will know, the whole dye thing…and we’ve got two people here in Bristol who I can think of (who are part of Fibreshed) – Babs Bahan, who is Botanical Inks, who has just moved to Dartmoor, and Ria Burns who is a knitwear designer and she dyes all her own yarn with plant-based dyes. And lots of people looking at flax….And wool products…there’s quite a lot of things going on – heritage wool…and some amazing businesses like the Natural Fibre Company who are working with small producers.
HK – Are there other local maker spaces that you connect with?
SD – There’s a really amazing enterprise in another part of Bristol that’s called the Knowle West Media Centre and there’s a place there called The Factory. And they got a lot of the European funding, and a lot of what they do is trying to engage with the community and run courses for people who are trying to start businesses and be a bit of an incubator. And they run a membership programme – very different to ours because it is just like a nominal amount you pay a month and then you can access their equipment. They have a members day every Wednesday and you can go in and use their kit… they’ve got amazing kit: laser cutters, two state-of-the-art Brother embroidery machines, heat presses, UV printers – like, all the stuff we do not have. I went to see them on Tuesday to talk about how we can strengthen our connections. They have digital embroiderers but we don’t because not all our members need that, but it’s great to know that for £8 an hour you could go and access that. It’s trying to join all the dots – which is what we are forever trying to do here.
HK – Can you tell me more about the Meet Make Mend workshop you run?
SD – With Meet Make Mend its interesting because initially it was a bigger community event and it was very much – you bring your stuff….and then during lockdown we couldn’t meet in person and somebody suggested – why don’t you meet online – which I thought was a terrible idea because I was like no ones going to come to that! – and actually it was amazing and was a really nurturing, very supportive group of people. We pretty much met for a year, every month, and it really sort of held everyone together and kept us all a bit sane. And then when we came back out of that (lockdown) the way that I’d run it had changed because it was much more about actually engaging with each other and talking about what you were working on….So it has changed in that respect, but I love it. We sit around the table and everyone talks about what it is they’re mending and then we go off on complete tangents….
HK – do you need to be a member to join it?
SD – No, not at all. I advertise it on the website and on Instagram and Facebook. It’s a flat rate. I did really wrangle about how much I charge people, but I got to the point where I was like – well you are learning something and it’s three hours of my time…So it’s not a huge amount of money – it’s £15. You can do a darning workshop and it’s £35 plus, so it’s hard because I didn’t want it to be that exclusive. But…it does feel like everyone gets a lot out of it, and you’re meeting other people and it’s such a cathartic thing to do. It’s a really nice balance of chatter and quiet, and everyone’s really relaxed. I’d love to be able to do more things like that. I ran a workshop in 2021 following on from everyone being locked away in lockdown. We won some funding to run a four-week course, but it had to be alongside a charity. We partnered up with a mental health peer support charity here in Bristol and I ran a series of four workshops online with their members all about mindful stitching and how to mend, and that was so brilliant. I’d love to get some more funding to do more of that.
HK – I think that’s something Katie and I are interested in and it resonated in terms of all the stuff that you do – the community and wellbeing from making stuff with other people.
SD – The repercussions for your mental health are so huge and I don’t think it’s shouted about enough. The whole thing with Claire Welsley Smith working with communities in Bradford – slow stitching with communities – it’s so inspiring and I would love to do that all the time. But how do you fund it? I’d love it to be a free thing…