Blog No 1.

A decade ago, I started a bespoke company with the intention of rescaling cutting and tailoring to redefine the craft of cloth-based accessories.
My loyal and enthusiastic clients report wearing the pieces with pride, and groomsmen share tales of how their piece became 'the topic of the day,' making this journey truly worthwhile and humbling.

The events of 2020 brought many challenges for us all; business slowed down, life's expectations changed, and big questions were asked. I realised I needed to set my sights on making new plans if I was to take my craft forward for another ten years...

This is what happened next:

Not for the first time, three years ago, I began a typically foolhardy journey to redefine my life's work. My ongoing interest in the origins and purposes of men's cloth accessories from the 11th to the 20th century, and how they could be reconsidered for today, though still fascinating to me, now seemed to need a wider context to remain relevant. Alongside this was my teaching career. For 25 years, I have taught research and design at Central Saint Martins, but I realised this needed to change too if the work was to remain purposeful.

Having grown up with a variety of learning difficulties that made connecting to everyday events, aural learning, and the written word virtually inaccessible to me, I eventually realised visual learning was my personal key to knowledge: infographics, charts, timelines, maps, and family trees informed me in meaningful ways.

So, I began to build a timeline, mapping 300,000 years of British history (as you do). This led me to the practices of long term thinking and the value of marking time by mapping the unfolding annual cycle of the turning seasons on the 'wheel of the year,' highlighting calendar-based customs, folklore festivity, ancient and new, that connect us all to the land and offer insight into our life's journey.

“God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape’

Barry Taylor: AC/DC's road manager

This is when it became clear that 'Storytelling From The British Timeline' could become a meaningful foundation for all my work moving forward, creating both connection for my different practices and a wider audience while being deeply personal, inserting my life story into this vast resource.