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Book

Sarah Bush

32 pages, 45 b/w illustrations.

A silk industry was first recorded in china about 2600 BC, its secrets spreading along the silk road to reach Constantinople in AD 500. In the fourteenth century it was establish in England. The early centres of the English silk industry, Spitalfields, Norwich and Canterbury, benefited from the arrival of the Dutch or Huguenot silk workers. In the 1820s the French Jacquard loom began to supersede the old drawloom, and in the 1830s power looms were first used to weave plain coarse spun silks. The decline began with Cobden's Free Trade Treaty of 1860, and was furthered by the advent of artificial silk. Thereafter, apart from a brief interlude of relative prosperity in the late 1920s and 1930s, the industry gradually diminished.

Sarah Bush studied history as a mature student and has researched the silk industry for the Macclesfield Silk Heritage.