Repair is a recent local project that coincided with the demolition of a 1970s housing estate, described as utopian at the time, Ripleyville in West Bowling, an area of South Bradford. The estate, built in 1975, replaced an earlier industrial model village (c.1868), also named Ripleyville, after Henry Ripley a textile dyeing industrialist who initiated the project. The project questioned how we think about change and repair in the context of the demolition and worked with women from the local community, some of whom had lived in the flats. We explored perceptions of the housing and the experience of living there through textile work. This included thinking about the language we use around community and the reality of social housing experiences. We worked with archives, materials and personal objects that had connections to the industrial heritage of West Bowling, where Bowling Dyeworks dominated the landscape until the middle of the twentieth century. We used the heritage to find ways of visual storytelling about change and community. This project strongly connected to my research project with The Open University exploring community resilience and wellbeing through the use of craft in former areas of industrial textile production.

I worked with the heritage of West Bowling and Ripleyville nearly ten years ago on a socially engaged project exploring the textile dyeing heritage of Bradford, The Fabric of Bradford, and a personal project ‘Dyer’s Field’. The landscape changes but working with textiles can offer new ways of thinking through this, a participant commenting, ‘It’s been a gentle way of talking about how you say goodbye to things.’

Repair took place at Shine, St Stephen’s Church, West Bowling and was supported by a Bradford Culture Commission grant. Many thanks to Sam Thirkhill, Sarah Hinton and the Creative Threads group.