Anyone who was at school up until the Nineteen Eighties would be familiar with the sort of wall map or atlas showing what is produced where in the British Isles, leaving a long and rather erroneous impression that motor cars are made in the West Midlands, coal is mined in South Wales or, say you needed a ship, the people of Glasgow or Sunderland could help you out.
Remarkably, the cottons, linens and woollens employed by Old Town are still produced in areas of the British Isles long associated with their particular product. Sadly, I cannont vouch for the British credentials of the Tin House cotton fabrics. We used denim from the last batch to be woven in Lancashire several years ago. Finishing and dyeing of the cotton twills is done here but I think the denims are one hundred per cent Indonesian.
Harris Tweed/Wool Serge Woven to our specification in the Outer Hebrides, Harris Tweed with its great heritage needs little introduction. Jackets are mainly made in this cloth although we do offer a couple of styles of lined trousers and skirts. Woven in West Yorkshire, our wool serge is of a quality formerly used for Royal Navy and transport uniforms.
Corduroy/Moleskin These two fustian type fabrics are supplied to Old Town by not only Lancashire’s but the world’s best maker of this stuff. Two weights are offered by us in various jackets and trousers. Very serviceable.
Cavalry Drill From the same supplier this fabric is similar to the cotton drill of our ‘Tin House’ range but with a distinctive diagonal weave and a bit more of a ‘snap’ to it.
Irish Linen Ulster with its long tradition of flax weaving provides Old Town with its most handsome summer fabric. A substantial weight linen, in four colours, is used for jackets and trousers. We also now offer a medium weight in black or two colours of pin stripe for ladies trousers, skirts, coats and dresses. The finer weights of plain and stripe are used for shirtings.
Cellular Cotton fabric from the rambling Thirties, used for shirting.
Brushed Cotton Fairly substantial stripe used for men’s shirts.
Sudbury Silk Those Huguenots in Sudbury, Suffolk, very obligingly weave tie fabrics to our design.
Simplicity of line, consistency of detail and durability of construction are the main considerations for our designs. We hope that they have a certain longevity of style which is non-specifically of the past, the intention being to appear chronologically neutral.
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The spirit of this time |
A major influence on Old Town and an interesting period in art and design were the years either side of and during the Second World War when a rather self-conscious British style emerged.
The British way of progress isn’t to look the future coldly in the eye but to constantly move forward by looking back. An example might be William Morris’ idealised view of medieval England then Laura Ashley’s take on William Morris. We move forward by looking out of the rear window to see where we’ve been.
Britain didn’t quite take to the European style hard edged Modernism of the Twenties and Thirties, seeming to prefer an invented folk art vision of the past. With the outbreak of war and the atmosphere of land under threat the works of Samuel Palmer, William Blake and Thomas Bewick were re-discovered as inspiration.
It wasn’t really until Modernism had been tempered with craft, heritage and injected with bran that it became the lovely welfare state consensus style of The Festival Of Britain. I mention the paintings or prints of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden as examples; whether the subject is a rusting traction engine or softly hued view of the South Downs. The Batsford Books and Penguin Popular Arts series cover similar territory - the en-noblement of the plough and the barge.
Cinema of the period developed a voice of its own with films such as ‘The Night Mail’ with music by Benjamin Britten, and the lovely and bizarre Powell and Pressburger - ‘A Canterbury Tale’.
The Ealing films of the post-war period showed British qualities of the small, the eccentric, the individual and the collective.
We hope that our styles have something of the spartan and institutional with a mothy comedy dinginess one associated with that time and genre.
One or two of our customers have enquired about the origins of the styles or patterns employed by Old Town. Having been very impressed by a friend showing me a bronze green velveteen frock coat which had been stuffed up a chimney in Yorkshire, possibly since the time of the Brontes, perhaps I can shed a little light on our source material.
Our single breasted rever collar jacket is an unfaithful copy of one found in a tool locker during the demolition of Stratford locomotive works; locker and contents seen on offer at Lea Bridge Road car boot sale.
Handed in as lost property in 1936, the originals for our style know as ‘High Rise’ were then mislaid behind a radiator in the London Transport Lost Property Office until redecoration in the early nineteen eighties.
Not so much lost as abandoned were the navy serge prison trousers left mysteriously inside a church porch on the north Kent marshes. For some years these trousers were one of the many curiosities to be seen in ‘Dirty Dick’s’ on Bishopsgate where the measure of them was taken as a model for our ‘Plains’.
Our popular ‘Overall Jacket’ is the mutant offspring of a pre-war lamplighter’s jacket glimpsed on the back of a chair in Coffee Republic at Canary Wharf.
We hope that this web site conveys not only the styles we currently offer but a sense of the rag-and-bone man dodging originals.
