Stitches In Time At St Anne’s, Limehouse

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Back in 2011, it was my privilege to interview Di England, the founder of Stitches in Time. Although Di passed in 2017, her creations live on and the magnificent quilts are now the subject of a retrospective exhibition which opens today from 10-4pm at St Anne’s, Limehouse and runs each Friday and Saturday from 10-4pm until September.

This is my portrait of Di England of Stitches in Time taken in 2011 with a tapestry based on the Roque Map of East London, 1746. It is just one of hundreds of elaborate textile pieces, created collaboratively and involving over three thousand people, that she has supervised.

As a consequence, the former Assembly Room of Limehouse Town Hall – in the shadow of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s, Limehouse – was turned into a kind of giant sewing box with a million reels of thread and scraps of fabric are neatly organised in containers. There you could find everything you could need for the embroidery, appliqué, batik, printing, painting and weaving that was involved in the creation of textile masterpieces which tell the story of the East End through stitching. In these works, intricate details reveal the contribution of individuals while the overall conceptions were a devised collectively, requiring critical decisions about the nature of the social pictures that result.

Inspired by the trade union banners that were once housed there when the building was a museum of Labour history, Stitches in Time was involved with all kinds of groups across the East End to create pictorial histories of communities, devised as endeavours to bring people together in the practise of making.

In a rare moment of repose, I was able to sit down with Di in a quiet corner of the Assembly Room – surrounded by piles of textiles and sewing paraphernalia – while she spoke to me of her own background and how it all started.

“I was an ordinary girl from St Albans. I had signed up for Social Anthropology because I was interested in people and instead I discovered it was all about statistics. But when I went to St Albans Arts College, I rang up my mother and said, “I found the right thing, first time.” Yet although I wanted to be an artist, I couldn’t think of a way to relate it to everyday life. We were from Yorkshire originally, but my father died when I was very young and my mother came South to earn a living. She was a primary school teacher, an educationalist with a passionate belief in the expressive arts.

I trained in painting & sculpture at the Bristol & West of England Academy and at Chelsea College of Art. At Chelsea, the textiles department was next door and I responded to that. My grandmother was a seamstress and two of my aunts were dressmakers who rode motor bikes in the nineteen thirties. Even as a child, I would collect leaves to make dyes and I gathered boxes of textiles.

I worked as a teacher at Newham in the early seventies before I joined Freeform Arts, a community arts organisation in Dalston and I found it refreshing because it was all to do with making, putting art where it wasn’t removed from everyday life. The question we asked ourselves was how could you create things that had relevance for people in their daily lives. At first, the Arts Council said, “We will fund the roses but not the dandelions.” though gradually they accepted the idea that art could be created where people lived, in the workplace and in schools, and they started a community arts panel.

Stitches in Time had its origin in 1993, I was doing a project at Beatrice Tate School in Bethnal Green, designing a mosaic, looking at the legacy of the Huguenots in the area. And I thought, “What were they doing here?” I had just finished designing a mural in Carnaby St in Soho which also had Huguenots, and I realised that both locations were gates to the city. It made me appreciate what refugees have contributed. I thought, “What can I do that everyone can participate in?”

At that time, I was setting up a print workshop in the Spitalfields Market and we made tapestries there that were a cultural history of the East End told by its people. We hung them up in the market and discovered there was huge demand for tapestries as community projects. By 1999, we received funding to create this organisation, Stitches in Time, with a special emphasis on local history. We moved into Limehouse Town Hall in 2001 and the next year we became a registered charity.

Bonnard, Chagall and Ingres were my inspirations, when I was a painter, but I have found a different way to make paintings in textiles now.”

The Tower of London by Bluegate Fields Infants School & Mothers’ Group.

St Dunstan’s by Members of St Dunstan’s Parish, Stepney.

Life Cycle of the Silk Worm by Shapla Primary School & Mothers’ Group.

The Jacquard Loom by Bancroft Women’s Group.

Jewish Wedding by Kobi Nazrul Centre.

Petticoat Lane by Heba Women’s Project.

You may also like to read these other stories about textiles

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Anjum Ishtaq, Heba Women’s Project

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