A Fabric Landscape

Fashion designer and judge of The Great British Sewing Bee, Patrick Grant, has a dream: he wants to create a line of jeans made in Blackburn. It sounds simple, but Patrick wants to go the whole hog - growing the crop to make the fabric in Blackburn, growing the woad to dye it blue in Blackburn and finally processing the flax into linen and sewing it all together...in Blackburn.In this programme, the writer and broadcaster Ian Marchant travels to a tiny field of flax on the side of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, where Patrick and a group of passionate local people are trying to make this dream a reality, and bring the textile industry back to Blackburn.But why? Blackburn and the area around it has been shaped by the textile industry for centuries, with the carcasses of old cotton mills littering the landscape. Ian visits Imperial Mill to hear what life was like for workers there in the industry's heyday. He finds out how Patrick and the team have been inspired by the visit of Mahatma Gandhi to Lancashire 90 years ago and learns why cotton made for a complicated relationship between Imperial Britain and India.Presented by Ian Marchant Produced by Heather Simons