For the past eight years on Mallon Farm in County Tyrone, Helen and Charlie have been growing and processing flax – likely the first to be sown and harvested on the island for decades.
What started as a nod to Northern Ireland’s textile past, lost to years of industrialisation, sparked an incredible passion for regrowing the natural fibre industry in a community- and nature-oriented way.
For the latest edition of our Regenerative Conversation series, protagonists of our We Feed The UK Fibre story, Helen and Charlie, were joined by a wonderful lineup of natural fibre enthusiasts to share their wisdom and inspiration with attendees of Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse’s Heritage Open Day.
From the first day we started growing flax on the farm, there was interest. People had a real connection with it.
And I think that is one of the things that has really made us fall in love with flax and growing it.
Helen Keys, Mallon Farm
Unlike the obsession with progress and productivity that swept Northern Ireland’s linen industry overseas, Helen and Charlie are looking to return to a human-scale, collaborative approach that nourishes life and the land.
Their work is echoed in Norfolk, a county with its own rich history of fibre production. Juliet Boyce of Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse’s Flax and Fleece Project has been regrowing flax in the region’s soils for the past four years, transforming the museum’s fascinating historic accounts into a living exhibit that reflects Mallon Farm’s ambitions for reviving sustainable textiles grown in the UK.
We don’t want to just see it as something behind a glass cabinet that we are preserving.
Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is look back to the past.
Juliet Boyce, Flax and Fleece Project
From “wee blue blossom” to the linen fabric we are acquainted with, flax undergoes a series of processes: softening and separating the fibres, spinning and weaving them. One of the challenges in flax production is the time and work required to undertake these processes by hand, or the incredible scale of harvests needed to make use of industrial machinery.
Nick Evans founded Fantasy Fibre Mill to develop open-source textile processing machinery suited to a small scale, but one large enough for growers to make a profit from their work. He engineers replicable machine templates to support the emergence of a local, decentralised, community-owned textile economy.
We take a lot of inspiration from the past and how machines were designed, and that heritage feeds into the future.
If we are going to become sovereign over our production, we are going to need to be able to build those machines ourselves; we are going to need to own those machines, and we are going to decide ourselves how we produce them and what we produce.
Nick Evans, Fantasy Fibre Mill
Local Norfolk artist Max Mosscrop has been using traditional methods to weave the linen fabric used in his practice for many years. Despite having a deep fascination and enthusiasm for the linen’s longstanding heritage in his local area, the flax Max uses, much to his disappointment, is imported from overseas.
There’s a sense of a lost art; a whole culture around linen production that has been lost.
You’re not just making a material; you’re making knowledge, and you’re making stories.
It’s those areas – the stories it produces and the community it makes – that are perhaps just as valuable as the material product.
Max Mosscrop, artist
