Ruddington Framework Knitters' Museum
About
The Site
Ruddington Framework Knitters' Museum occupies a complex of frameshops, cottages, and outbuildings arranged around a garden courtyard, together with the former Primitive Methodist chapel in which many of the knitters worshipped. The site was saved from demolition in the early 1970s and has since been restored to show the working and living conditions of the framework knitters who occupied it throughout the nineteenth century. Contrast the spartan conditions of a 'back to back' cottage occupied by a framework knitter in the mid-nineteenth century with the comparative comfort enjoyed by the Parker family, owners of the site, at the turn of the twentieth century,
What
IS Framework Knitting?
The knitting frame was invented by William Lee of Calverton in Nottinghamshire in the late sixteenth century. Initially workers had a frame at home, but by the early nineteenth century a more organised system of working was evolving with frameshops being constructed to house anything up to forty hand frames. The Ruddington complex is an interesting early example of this change over to a factory system of working and comprises two large frameshops (each containing two workshops), four cottages and assorted outbuildings.
A
Working museum
One of the workshops has been restored to its original working state, with knitting frames arranged down both sides of the long narrow room with its characteristic full length windows. Here you can see the demonstrators making fabric on the hand frame exactly as it was done over 150 years ago. A second workshop houses a collection of griswold machines, a circular knitting machine used to make tubular fabric and socks. Visitors are invited to try their hand hand on a griswold machine and there are sock and shawls made on the site by the staff and volunteers available for sale in the museum shop.
Further
Information
Opening Times: Easter to December, Wednesday-Saturday & Bank Holiday Mondays 11.00am-4.30pm, last ticket sale 4.00pm. Easter-September Sundays 1.30-4.30pm.
Address: Ruddington Framework Knitters' Museum, Chapel Street, Ruddington, Nottingham NG11 6HE
Telephone: (0115) 984 3694
