In June we examined some of the regional cloth manufactures that ensured the continuing importance of wool in Victorian Britain, from Yorkshire worsteds and Welsh flannels to Cotswold broadcloths and Witney blankets. Two other key aspects of the British woollen industry should also be touched on before we summarise and complete this topic.

Felt
A relatively small yet significant product was a non-woven fabric: pressed felt. Felt-making, an ancient craft, was first practised in Central Asia and elsewhere, even before the development of woven cloth. Using simple processes involving heat, moisture, pressure or agitation, manufacturers caused the keratin protein in natural animal fur or fleece fibres to become chemically bound to the protein in other fibres. This produced condensed felted materials ranging from the soft and bulky to others so solid that they must be cut with a saw.

Britain had a long history of fashionable felt hat-making, initially using beaver pelts, then, during the late 1800s and early 1900s woollen felt hats such as bowlers, trilbies, fedoras and homburgs. But it was the manufacture of cheap carpets in the 19th century that inspired the modern mechanised felt industry. This became established in Yorkshire, with other important centres in Scotland, Lancashire, the West Country, Northern Ireland and Wales. From Leeds, woollen felt carpet manufacturing moved to Rossendale, where the block printers who created the designs achieved the best results. Rossendale also pioneered felt slippers, which advanced into a major new 19th century industry. Eventually felt floor coverings were replaced by power-loom woven carpets, but by then manufacturers were finding new uses for the product. In recent decades felt tends to be of two main kinds –coloured felts used for toys, crafts and display materials; and industrial felts for engineering, building, soundproofing etc.

Carpets
Luxury carpets first appeared in Britain in the 1500s and for centuries were only seen in prosperous homes, often being used to cover tables and adorn walls, rather than floors. The first UK carpet-makers employed traditional Turkish techniques, hand-knotting the tufts in painstaking, laborious fashion, perpetuating high costs. Loom-woven woollen carpets were manufactured from the 17th century, a carpet factory being built at Wilton in 1655, but only a century later was the other famous carpet company, Axminster, established (1755). By the early 1800s some existing woollen cloth manufacturing companies were switching to carpets and eventually demand soared during the Victorian era, when Jacquard’s punched cards were used to create the bright carpet patterns desired by a mass market.