Heritage · Longread
The last loom on Weavers' Row
For sixty-one years the shuttle has crossed the same warp. Margaret Oyelaran is teaching four apprentices before the workshop lease runs out in spring.
The workshop smells of lanolin and wet stone. It is 6:40 in the morning and the only sound on Weavers' Row is the beat of the reed, four times a second, the same tempo Margaret Oyelaran set when she was nineteen years old and the row still had eleven working looms on it.
She counts the apprentices off on her fingers. Two came from the college, one from the fish market, one walked in after reading a notice pinned to the library door. None of them had touched a loom in January. By June all four could dress a warp unaided.
“You cannot put a loom in a museum and call that keeping it. A loom that isn't running is furniture.”
The lease question is not complicated, only unresolved. The building belongs to the harbour trust, which has been asked to decide between a twenty-year peppercorn rent and a sale. A decision is expected before the end of the year.
What happens after that is the part Oyelaran declines to speculate about. She has cloth to finish: forty metres of it, promised to a choir in the next town, due the first week of September.