Textiles of the North East

Enjoy a full-day hand-sewing workshop in the hotel with Kim. Tea/coffee will be served in the morning and afternoon.

Beamish Museum is a living museum; an open-air reconstruction of everyday life in North East England from the 1820s to the 1950s, where streets, cottages, farms and workshops are brough to life by museum staff and volunteers using the tools and skills of the past.

A defining feature of Beamish is its commitment to local craft traditions. The museum is especially valuable for showing how craft was embedded in both the home and the workplace. In the Georgian area, for example, quilting and textile work are interpreted through recreated domestic interiors whilst in the Edwardian town, traditional trades such as tin smithing, pottery, woodworking and printmaking illustrate the specialist craftsmanship that served urban communities before mass manufacturing transformed production. We’ll spend a full day exploring the site.

Dinner at the hotel is included this evening.

The Bowes Museum is one of the most significant museums in northern England, housed in a striking 19th-century French-style château. The museum’s costume collection is especially notable for the way it traces changing dress from the 17th to the 20th century. Garments are displayed as evidence of craftsmanship as much as fashion revealing techniques of tailoring, embroidery, lacemaking and fabric construction.

Another strength of the Bowes Museum is its quilt collection, which holds an important archive of North Country quilting traditions. The museum has over 100 quilts, many with direct links to County Durham and the surrounding region, documenting techniques such as wholecloth quilting, pieced patchwork and frame quilting. These quilts reveal the artistic and social significance of domestic needlework, where practical household objects also became evidence of technical skill and personal expression.

We’ll spend a full day here, enjoying an informative introductory tour of the museum in the morning followed by a curator talk in the afternoon. revealing techniques of tailoring, embroidery, lacemaking and fabric construction.

Enjoy the evening at leisure.

Shipley Art Gallery is one of the North East’s most important centres for decorative arts and contemporary craft. Opened in 1917, the gallery holds a collection of applied arts that reflects both international craftsmanship and the traditional crafts of North East England. A particular strength of the Shipley Art Gallery is its textile exhibits, connecting regional craft traditions to contemporary practice with its collection of quilts, rag rugs, stitched works and experimental textile art by British makers.

What makes the collection distinctive is its grounding in local heritage: the Shipley Art Gallery preserves examples of North East wholecloth quilting and rag-rug making, crafts deeply associated with domestic life in County Durham and Tyneside. These examples of regional textiles place women’s labour at the heart of the collection. Historic North Country quilts demonstrate the precision of hand quilting traditions, while rag rugs reveal the reuse of worn fabric in mining and industrial communities, where thrift became a creative practice. By displaying these alongside works by contemporary textile artists such as Dinah Prentice and Michele Walker, the gallery illustrates how local textile traditions can inform modern artistic experimentation. We’ll spend the morning here, enjoying an informative tour and an object handling session.

The Discovery Museum is one of the North East’s principal museums of social, industrial and scientific history holding extensive social history collections that document everyday life in the city and wider Tyneside. The museum’s costume collection is especially significant for tracing the lives of women through, its holdings including daywear, eveningwear, accessories and undergarments, ranging from Victorian silk gowns to mid-twentieth-century ready-to-wear fashion.

Also of particular importance are the textile collections connected to domestic making. Quilts, samplers, embroidered linens and household sewing survive as records of women’s skilled labour, much of which took place outside formal industry but was essential to household economies. This afternoon we’ll enjoy a tour of the museum stores, during which we’ll learn how the items are preserved and view clothing from the Victorian period to the present day, discussing the social history of the times and how it affected what people wore.

Dinner at the hotel is included this evening.

Durham Cathedral is one of Britain’s most important medieval religious buildings. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is often celebrated for its Norman architecture and manuscript collections, yet it also preserves a significant collection of ecclesiastical textiles including vestments, altar frontals, banners and liturgical fabrics, many of which demonstrate highly skilled hand embroidery with examples of appliqué, couching, goldwork and hand embroidery.

We’ll enjoy a guided embroidery & textile tour here this morning, with the rest of the day free for you to further explore the cathedral or other areas of Durham.

This evening is at leisure.

Enjoy a full-day hand-sewing workshop in the hotel with Kim. Tea/coffee will be served morning and afternoon.

Dinner at the hotel is included this evening.