Knowing that Old Town Clothing is due to close by the end of the year, I have been planning a last trip – a pilgrimage – to Holt to pay my respects to Marie Willey and Will Brown who have supplied me with clothes for the last, roughly thirty years, ever since I came upon their first shop in Elm Hill in Norwich.
I went today.
They have had enough. Hardly surprising. They’ve been doing it a long time and it’s hard work running a small business, taking orders, getting things made, not using a factory, but local machinists. It’s become harder to find people with the necessary skills. They have insisted on everything being done to the highest standards. That’s the whole point.
I have been disappointed how little interest there has been in maintaining these craft skills, encouraging the training of the next generation, the idea of rural industry. In Japan, they would be living national treasures. But here I’m not sure we recognise, let alone esteem, the intersection between craft and small-scale industrial production:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
I too will miss Old Town – and you correctly identify the much wider loss than my concern about where I’ll ever find such warm and comfortable suits …
I love Will and Marie’s instagram content and am sad to see them shut up shop. Sewing skills are always undervalued – I speak as someone who makes most of my own clothes and also makes quilts for friends and family. When our garden shed/workroom was recently open for London Open House quite a few people asked if I sold my quilts or took commissions. The reason I don’t is that any true price (reflecting materials costs and making time) would be much more than I’d be comfortable asking for. And, we have the historic example in my family of my aunt who was one of the seamstresses at Fords in Dagenham. Along with her colleagues she struck to get equal pay for work of equal value (equivalent men’s skills were paid more highly).