My grandmother worked in the textile mills.
In West Yorkshire, that sentence used to be unremarkable. It's what people did. The wool trade built this part of the world, the mills, the terraces, the town halls, the whole shape of the place. Bradford was once the woollen capital of the world, and everything around here was arranged in service of that.
Then, over the course of a few decades, most of it went. I've watched the tail end of that happen in my own lifetime: the mills that closed, the ones converted into flats, the skills that simply stopped being passed on. It's a strange thing to grow up somewhere that used to make things and mostly doesn't any more.
Which is a large part of why Bean and Bemble is made the way it is.
Moorside Mills
A while ago we took the children to Bradford Industrial Museum, and I've been recommending it to people ever since.
It's housed in Moorside Mills in Eccleshill, a small worsted spinning mill built around 1875, restored and turned into a museum in the 1970s. That's the first thing that gets you: you're not looking at industrial heritage in a purpose-built visitor centre. You're standing in it. The building itself is the largest object in the collection.
Inside there's textile machinery, steam engines, printing presses and a transport gallery, and crucially a great deal of it still works. The textile gallery takes you through the whole process, raw wool spun into yarn, dyed, woven into cloth, with demonstrations of the machinery running. It is extraordinarily loud, and that's the point. Standing next to one machine in operation tells you more about what a working day in a mill was actually like than any amount of reading.
My grandmother would have recognised every bit of it.
There's also a blacksmith's forge with live demonstrations, a row of re-erected back-to-back houses furnished for three different periods, and the mill manager's house and the contrast between the two is the whole social history of the place in about forty yards.
The children loved it, incidentally, which I hadn't entirely expected. There's a learning zone, hands-on activities, and enough enormous machinery to hold anyone's attention.
And it's free to get in. Free parking too. Donations welcome, and worth giving.
A few practical notes: it's closed on Mondays, and the machine running times depend on staff availability, so if you're going specifically to see things in motion, ring ahead. Full details are on the Bradford Museums website.
Why now is a good moment to go
Bradford spent 2025 as UK City of Culture, and around three million people came to something over the course of the year. A great deal of that programme was about the district's heritage, the mills, the architecture, the industrial story, and legacy funding is still going into local heritage sites.
If you've never had a reason to go to Bradford, there's rarely been a better one. The city has spent a year being looked at properly, often by people who'd written it off, and the general verdict was that they'd got it wrong.
From the mills to a laptop and a search engine
When I first started sketching out product ideas for Bean and Bemble, I was fairly sure of one thing: there must still be brilliant manufacturers left in this country. It couldn't all have gone.
So my mum and I sat down and started searching. Properly searching, the unglamorous, weeks-long kind, emailing factories, asking for samples, asking who they used.
And there are. Some of them are genuinely world-class, and quite a few are small family businesses much like ours.
Our tea towels, aprons and oven gloves are printed and made in the UK. Our greeting cards and gift wrap come from a British printer running a zero-to-landfill site. Our placemats, coasters and boards are made here from sustainably forested board. Our cushions are handmade to order in London.
Walking through the printing gallery at the museum, past presses that would have produced posters and packaging for local businesses a century ago, I did think: this is the same trade. Different machines, same idea. Somebody designs something, somebody else prints it beautifully, and it ends up in someone's house.
There's a lot more detail about who makes what, and what they do with their waste, on our how we make things page.
Why it matters to keep buying it
I'm not going to pretend that buying a British-made tea towel reverses the deindustrialisation of West Yorkshire. It doesn't.
But those small manufacturers exist because people place orders with them. Every one of those workshops is somebody's business, employing people locally, and holding on to skills that take years to learn and about five minutes to lose permanently. Once the last person who knows how to do something retires without training anyone, that's it.
Given what happened to the mills my grandmother worked in, that isn't an abstract argument to me.
So when you buy something made here, from us or from anyone else, that's what you're keeping going. Thank you for caring where your things come from.
Michelle x
Bradford Industrial Museum Moorside Mills, Moorside Road, Eccleshill, Bradford, BD2 3HP Free entry and free parking. Closed Mondays. Plan a visit →
If you're exploring this part of the world, our shop in Hebden Bridge is about half an hour over the tops from Bradford, and we'd love to see you.
You might also like The Yorkshire Edit — art, gifts and homeware inspired by home — and our Yorkshire art prints.