The Museum
The rope store, eighty years deep
The old rope store behind the workshop holds the collection: every pattern, every prototype, and the wrecks we couldn't throw away. Open shop hours, free, donations feed the tea fund.
Ada's bench
1931 · original
The kitchen table where the first diamond was cut, pine, ink-stained, burnished by four generations of palms. The 1931 paper template still hangs above it in a frame off a sailmaker's locker.
The gale roof
1938 · one slate
Not a whole roof, though the story grows yearly. One slate, blown from the original works, carried the vicar's pencilled note and hangs beside it, unrepented.
Silk drawer no. 4
1952 · Reg Halyard
The barrage-balloon silk samples that changed the catalogue, in their original greasepaper. Colours the modern mills no longer bother to make.
The centenary river
1967 · photographs
Forty feet of Serpent tail photographed from the steamer, mounted full-width of the room, with the tail itself, two flags short, coiled beneath.
Wrecks worth keeping
The top shelf holds the collection's failures: the quad that looped itself to death in 1989, the silk bird the heron mistook for competition, and the experimental box kite of 1961 that flew beautifully in exactly one documented hour and never again. Every failure is labelled. Some are labelled honestly.