Alan Willey

WHEN tennis stars and foreign royalty come to Finsbury Park, they’re usually here for the yarn.

Whether they make the trip for cotton or silk blends, hemp, lunatic fringe or turtle loom kits, it’s all there at 140 Seven Sisters Road, home to The Handweavers Studio and Gallery.

“Venus Williams doesn’t come for Wimbledon anymore, she comes for Handweavers,” said Alan Willey, who has stewarded the business with his wife, Dawn, since 2016.

“The Queen of Malaysia shops with us. She flies over and fills the diplomatic aircraft with weave.

“As I’m speaking to you, there’s a lady standing here who has come over from New Zealand. That’s the kind of motivation that people have, that want the craft to continue.”

The pilgrimage to Handweavers will now require a little detour, as the Willeys shut up the shop in Islington at the end of May and relocated the business to Dorset, on the edge of the New Forest.

“You can only imagine the cost of leasing in Islington,” Mr Willey said.

“Having a shop on a high street is, as they say, a very expensive moral high ground to be on. It’s idealistic real estate.”

‘Fibre-aholic’ Dawn Willey

Established by four friends in Walthamstow in 1973, Handweavers moved to Seven Sisters Road in 2009 before the Willeys took it on.

Handweaving is – for the less crafty among us – a method of textile production where two sets of yarn are interlaced, usually using a loom, to create fabric.

It’s a niche hobby, but one that attracts passionate fans, and if you mention Handweavers to any of them they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.

“A French girl came in one morning and she didn’t leave until 6 o’clock in the evening. She said, ‘I’ve come from Paris to spend the day in your shop, because this is the only way I can see, touch and feel the yarns’. There’s nowhere else in the world that does it.”

It’s not only international crafters who are drawn in by the sheer variety of colourful textured threads – Mr Willey told how, every week, a grown man would do a double take as he walked past, come into the store and end up in floods of tears.

“He’s remembering his childhood, sitting at his grandmother’s feet as she weaves, and now here he is on Seven Sisters Road, where you don’t expect to see looms and spinning wheels in the shop window. It evokes all those memories and feelings. That interaction with people is just awesome really. I never thought that textiles or craft could touch people’s lives in the way they do.”

The Handweavers Studio workshop

While the couple run Handweavers together, it is Dawn Willey who loves and teaches the craft – “I call her a fibre-aholic,” her husband said. “Anything to do with spinning, weaving, she’s there.”

Ms Willey comes from a sewing family, and used to work with seamsters who made clothes for Queen Elizabeth II, but it was the tactile nature of weaving that made her fall in love with it.

“Textiles were in me, I suppose, and with weaving you’ve got both the artistic side – planning the textures – but you’ve also got a touch of the mathematical side. They say weaving keeps both sides of your brain happy.

“You think, ‘I’ll just do 10 minutes’, and then it’s two hours later – time disappears when I’m weaving more than anything else I do.”

She added: “When we first took over, we were utterly amazed at the breadth of different people who came to Handweavers – artists, hat-makers, embroiderers, dyers, people making film sets.”

The international visitors were another surprise. “I always knew Handweavers was in the psyche of weavers worldwide, but I had not realised how much.”

Handweavers has relocated to 10 The Old Pottery, Verwood, Dorset BH31 6HF and continues to provide workshops and training there.