BigShinyThing

The BBC reports today that celebrity knitting has sparked a new craze. John Lewis said it sold 93,000 balls of wool last week - up 60% on last year. Stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman and Madonna have been outed as knitters. John Lewis haberdashery buyer Lucy Wright said chunky knitwear was featuring on catwalks and knitting was “being referred to as the new yoga” - a little bit of an overclaim, methinks. “We are seeing more customers buying wool to make jumpers, scarves and fashion accessories such as pom poms,” she said.

Knitting has been bubbling under for a while now, what with club knitting and organisations such as Cast Off. A mass knitting event at the Victoria & Albert museum last year was a huge success. Also, a recent conservation project in Tasmania succeeded in getting 15,000 jumpers knitted for penguins to protect them from a oil spill. Photograph from ABC Canberra.

This story has also been covered by The Independent.

HM Redsands was built in 1943 to counter German warplanes. It was abandoned in the 1950s but a decade later became home to a number of pirate radio stations. Today is stands derelict and unloved apart from a group of enthusiasts who have vowed to save the structures for posterity.

The fort, designed by Guy Maunsell, is made up of seven towers. Each of these has a two-storey house (36 ft by 36 ft) on top of four 65 ft concrete legs. in 1943, the towers, complete with crew, were towed out at spring high tide and hand-winched on to the seabed. They were then linked by steel walkways.

The fort was home to 265 men on six week tours at a time. Not surprisingly, the solitude led to a spate of suicides after which knitting was instituted as a hobby to keep the men busy. In total, the army forts in the Thames shot down 22 planes and 30 flying bombs but amazingly were never hit.

Both The Times and BBC Breakfast have picked up on the story in recent weeks. Meanwhile, artist Stephen Turner is planning to spend six weeks on one of the towers. He will be keeping a diary in order to produce a book about the experience, funded by a $42,000 Arts Council grant. He says on his website, “The Seafort Project is an artistic exploration of isolation, investigating how one’s experience of time changes in isolation, and what creative contemplation means in a twenty first century context.”

We shall see.