Two benches, one window, upstairs at 14 Priestpopple
Workroom
Since 2009
Everything is cut flat before it is anything else
Halstock began when Edith Marrable bought a plan chest and a shear table at the closing sale of a Newcastle coat factory and had them carried up a staircase that was two centimetres too narrow. The table is still here and still the biggest thing in the room; every coat that leaves starts as a flat shape chalked onto it.
Joss Tunnicliffe joined in 2016 from an alterations counter in Carlisle and now makes most of the coats, while Edith cuts and fits. Between them that is thirty-four years of this, which sounds like a lot until you learn that a coat takes nineteen hours and there are only two pairs of hands.
Twelve pieces are in the book, not forty. Eleven coatings sit on the shelf because that is what fits on the shelf. We make around a hundred and ten made-to-measure coats a year and have never advertised.
“Nineteen hours. Four of them are the shoulder, and nobody who buys the coat will ever know which four.”
Joss Tunnicliffe · coat maker
Coming up the stairs
The green door between the ironmonger and the bank, lower bell, one flight up. If the door is on the latch it means we are at the bench and you should come up anyway.
Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday, ten until five. Closed for the first fortnight of August, because the mills are. Eleven minutes on foot from Hexham station; two free hours behind the Forum. Step-free entry is through the yard — say so when you book and we will meet you at that door instead.
14 Priestpopple, Hexham, Northumberland NE46. Telephone 01434 555 0147. Email reaches us in the evening and is answered the same night.
The drawer under the window, Thursday morning, before anyone has been in.
Twelve pieces · eleven cloths
Prices, sizes and what is in the drawer this week — the whole book is one page.
Free UK delivery over £150 · 30 days to return anything ready to wear