Stitching Past & Present…

Stitching Past & Present: Textile Stories at Canons House, was a commission from the London Borough of Merton to produce wall hangings for Canons House in Mitcham, along with an interpretive display. This included workshops to engage different parts of the community. The first was a sewing workshop for over-16s in July 2023. The aim was to breathe new life into Merton’s textile heritage and enable participants to use their own creativity to connect to it.  

In September 2023, we ran a drop-in workshop for children and families in the grounds of Canons House to produce a length of colourful block-printed calico. This was used in another sewing workshop in February 2024, in which participants created hand-stitched pieces for the wall hanging that formed the centrepiece of the interpretive display that opened in Canons Sharing Space in April 2024.  

We created a second wall hanging, that is on permanent display in Canons House. It borrows motifs from carpets made at William Morris’s Merton Abbey Works in the late 1800s, which draw on the intricate geometric patterns of Islamic design. Some motifs are cut from the block-printed Calico which was created at the community workshops held at the Canons in summer 2023. The aim was to draw together the strands of Canons’ textile history and weave them into a new story made by and for people who use Canons House today.