A technician, a financier and a mill in Oakworth.

Laxtons began in 1907 as Holmes Laxton & Co, a worsted spinning mill in Oakworth, near Keighley in West Yorkshire. The company’s own history names two founders: George Laxton, who brought the technical knowledge, and Gordon Holmes, who brought the financial expertise. The mill spun wool and mohair yarns. Before the First World War, the company says, it worked with a Bradford weaver on a process that dissolved away cotton fibre to leave pure mohair, which it describes as producing the first lightweight mohair suiting fabric in the world; we give that as its claim.

The interwar years were hard. The company says it worked one week on and one week off for around three years during the Depression of the 1930s, and in the same period began exporting yarn to Germany for upholstery fabrics. George Laxton’s son, also called George, joined in 1930 and volunteered for the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, while the mill made yarn for military uniforms under the government’s Wool Control and women took over work traditionally done by men. After the war, the company says, George Laxton was the first British yarn salesman to go back to Germany, where only one of its 35 pre-war customers remained.

The firm moved as it grew. In the early 1960s, its history says, it exported 99 per cent of its production, and it moved its machinery to Prospect Mills in Ingrow, adapting its yarns from upholstery to women’s outerwear for weavers in Huddersfield, in Scotland and overseas. Gordon Holmes retired in 1966, and in 1974 the company bought a mohair fancy-twisting plant in Scotland and began producing yarns for hand knitting. It later built a new plant at Silsden, from which, it says, it sold to more than 80 countries.

Four generations, and a return home.

The late twentieth century brought the collapse of much of the industry. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, the company says, it set up a joint venture with a co-operative of mohair farmers in South Africa and moved an entire spinning plant from Yorkshire to Port Elizabeth. James Laxton, the fourth generation of the family, joined in 1992; the company describes the decade that followed, with cheap imports and customers moving production abroad, as probably the most devastating in the history of the British textile industry, with hundreds of spinners closing for good.

Laxtons says it re-shored all of its manufacturing in December 2009, invested in more capacity over the following seven years, and then outgrew its premises and built a new spinning mill. That mill is at Baildon, near Shipley in the Bradford district, according to the company and its consumer brand. The company now registered at Companies House, Laxtons Limited, was incorporated in 2002, and the company website names James Laxton as owner and managing director.

Laxtons is chiefly a business-to-business spinner. It describes itself as a manufacturer of worsted and fancy yarns, and its range covers hand-knitting, machine-knitting, woven apparel and upholstery yarns, as well as undyed yarns for hand dyers, felters and weavers. For the hand-knitting trade it says it is a leading maker of private and own-label yarns, spinning wool, alpaca, mohair, cashmere and silk in weights from laceweight to super chunky, spinning fibre supplied by customers on commission and dyeing hanks in its own dyehouse. Its “By the Box” service sells stock yarns with minimum orders of 30kg. Many knitters may therefore have used a Laxtons yarn under another brand’s label without seeing the Laxtons name.

British wool, spun close to home.

The seven brands in this group all sell British yarn for hand knitting and crochet: West Yorkshire Spinners, John Arbon, Baa Ram Ewe, Blacker Yarns, Laxtons, Uist Wool and Fyberspates. They share a country, but not a way of making yarn, and the difference between them says a good deal about what is left of Britain’s wool industry.

Britain once spun yarn on an industrial scale, and the mills that remain are a small fraction of what there was. Some brands still own the machinery that turns fleece into yarn. Others design yarns and colours and pay a mill — at home or abroad — to spin them, which is how much of the modern yarn trade works. Between the two sit firms that do part of the work themselves, such as dyeing or blending, and buy in the rest. A brand’s label rarely makes clear which kind of company it is.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now and where its yarn is spun and dyed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Naming the sheep, the farms and the Dales.

The company’s recent branding has been about provenance. Its Sheepsoft yarn is described as 100 per cent British wool, blending Bluefaced Leicester for softness with Masham for durability, and the company says it goes from fleece to finished yarn in less than 50 miles; its shades are named after places in the Yorkshire Dales, such as Malham, Settle and Grassington. Wooltrace, which Laxtons says it created, is a traceable range: a batch code entered on the Wooltrace website is meant to show the farms the wool came from, and the scheme says it guarantees its farmers a fair price. Laxtons said in April 2023 that it had announced both ranges at the h+h Cologne craft trade fair.

The same report described a forthcoming consumer brand, byLaxtons. Its successor, Bramble & Fleece, now sells the mill’s hand-knitting yarns direct to knitters; its website dates the first hand-knit collection, By Laxtons, to 2020, says “today we are evolving the brand into bramble & fleece,” and says the yarns are spun at the Baildon mill. Laxtons also says it supports the Campaign for Wool.

For a design guide, Laxtons shows how a trade spinner with more than a century behind it can step out from behind other brands’ labels by naming the sheep, the farms and the Dales its wool comes from. Compare West Yorkshire Spinners, another Yorkshire mill selling British wool under its own name, and John Arbon, another British mill. For this guide we use moorland green, fleece cream and a heather plum with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Laxtons’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.