I'm a total nerd. Just spent the past couple of days adding to my vintage knitting places of the UK. There are independent stores (purple), pattern and wool companies (blue) and have started adding the almost 300 stores for the Scotch Wool and Hosiery Stores (red.)
I get the places from the old patterns, often independent stores would add their stamp to the cover. I also try to add the patterns they supplied and the approximate decade. For the companies that's a simple matter of taking the address from the back of the patterns and I add a note for the decade and sometimes a little bit of their history if I can find it.
The Scotch Wool and Hosiery Stores info comes from a small booklet they sold in the 1920s "Handbook of Knitting and Crochet" that details the nearly 300 stores they had across the UK and Ireland.
