World 124, Exploration A

Posted byAmy Twigger HolroydPosted inExplorations 1-100Tags:, , ,
Newspaper headline about an upcoming Shearing Festival in Hyde Park.
A small piece of knitting on needles with two balls of yarn in natural shades of brown and beige, alongside squared paper with a knitting chart, drawn in pencil. Hand-written alongside it, a calendar records sheep-related activities: condition checks in September and October; breeding in November; winter feeding for November through to January, leading up to lambing in the new year. The knitting represents the calendar, with the information encoded in the two-colour pattern.
A brown cardboard box with several knitted items and a handwritten label ‘Communal Knits – choose whichever you like’.
Email reminder that the recipient's household is responsible for care of the flock for the coming week.
Google map with pins locating Fleece prep and finish centres in London. Detailed listings include Kentish Town City Woollens and Belmont Children's Farm and Wool Prep Centre.
Online London tube map warning of no service on the Piccadilly line between Rayners Lane and Uxbridge due to escaped sheep.
Five star reviews for a sheep dog-themed cafe. One with the heading ‘Bizarre but great’ describes London now as a ‘kind of urban farm paradise’, this cafe being ‘a quirky totem of the change’. The second, headed ‘Sheepdogs and falafel?’ praises the delicious food and the chance to meet real life working dogs.
Queens Park community council webpage with links to an extraordinary council meeting, a free grazing expansion meeting, and community clean up.
New York Times Travel section article headed ‘London's Green and Pleasant Land? Sheep take centre stage at a celebration of wool culture, but it's not without its detractors’.
Online Vogue link to Fashion item ‘The Shepherdwear Trend Up Close’, tagged ‘Wool trends’.
Financial Times headline: ‘Global interest in commoning surges, sparked by UK example: economists impressed by a wool based commons model adopted by all cities in UK’.
Google scholarly journal search bringing up ‘Urban grazing increases biodiversity faster than rural grazing’, by Nottingham, 2021.
Guardian Jobs vacancy for Shepherd, ‘City experience preferred, to work with the prized Camden borough herds, competitive salary'.

In World 124, herds of sheep roam free on the streets of London. Their presence is deeply integrated to the life of the city, in all walks of life.

At an early age children learn the shepherding almanac: important knowledge of the jobs to be carried out throughout the year. The abundance of wool has led to the development of a haptic mode of knowledge-keeping, based on knitted stitches.

The knitted calendar (shown here with a translation into diagram format) begins in September, with the sorting of rams and ewes for condition before breeding in October. During the winter months some of the sheep are kept under cover in Finsbury Park, while the hardier breeds continue to roam residential streets. In spring the calendar can be used to record the number of lambs born each month.

Textile making is widespread within the community. The communal knit box contains shared projects that people can contribute to while they wait for a train. Anyone is welcome to take an item when it is finished, free of charge. People enjoy this communal way of creating practical clothing items, alongside the commercial clothing sector.

The array of screenshots gathered here provides further valuable insight into the sheep-centric culture, including:

  • the Evening Standard looking forward to a large-scale Shearing Festival in Hyde Park
  • an email reminder for household flock care duties
  • a map showing the many ‘fleece and prep finish centres’ around the city
  • news about delays on the London Underground due to sheep on the line
  • reviews of a sheep dog-themed café
  • a community meeting discussed the expansion of free grazing
  • an article in the New York Times exposing tensions in London’s wool-centric culture
  • Vogue celebrating the shepherdwear trend
  • interest in commoning, developed through the sharing of grazing rights, spreading into the wider economy – as recognised by the Financial Times
  • academic research into the biodiversity impacts of urban grazing
  • an advertisement for the role of shepherd for the prize-winning Camden borough herds

This Exploration was contributed by Katherine Pogson and a Fashion Fictions contributor (located in the UK), developed from a World contributed by Sarah Kilkenny, using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the authors and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.

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Published by Amy Twigger Holroyd

explorer of Fashion Fictions