British Textile Biennial
Throwing a spotlight on the nation’s creativity, innovation and expression in textiles against the backdrop of the impressive infrastructure of the cotton industry in Pennine Lancashire. In 2025 the British Textile Biennial looks at invention and innovation, past, present, and future. With artists and designers, BTB25 looks back to see how the textile pioneers of 20th century Lancashire were inspired by a bold vision of the future that revolutionised our lives and investigates how our own material future must learn from a distant past that is almost lost to us. Clothing the men and women that conquered the sky, the mountains and the oceans in the last century, with man-made fabrics and chemical concoctions which populated the realms of sci-fi, those innovators did not realise the toll they would take on the planet. Now we must reach back into our ancestral past to rediscover nature’s own innovation and how we may harness it to begin to repair and regenerate, exploring indigenous practices that still carry that knowledge and point to new solutions to heal what we once sought to dominate. With its epic mills and grandiose civic architecture along the country’s longest waterway, the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, the landscape tells the story of textiles. This biennial festival celebrates that story while showcasing its contemporary expression with the community that has textiles in its DNA.
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