Updated Vintage Knitting Map

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.

Knitting shops now gone

I've long been intrigued by the number of knitting shops that used to populated the UK. Talking to older people has made me realise that just about every town had somewhere to buy wool no matter how small so last year made a start on logging them on Google Maps.

The locations come from the stamps that shops put on the patterns, usually on the front cover, but sometimes on the inside. There are a few that I can't find, the red dots, but hope that by the time I've gone through my entire collection I might have worked out where they are.


This is a work in progress so hopefully the map with gather more pink dots and show just how widespread wool and craft shops were. My dream is to find a shop that is pre 1969 and still open.