New Installation Depicts Lincoln’s History

Lincoln BIG's 'Lincoln Creates' fund enabled the creation and installation of a new piece of art for the city which shows the rich heritage of the city and its traders.

Lincoln has a 1000 year history of trade! For a millennium people have bought & sold; brought jobs and services to the city and quietly supplied the people around them with what they need. But how many of them do we remember? They are lost in the stitches of time. We would like to create a piece of textile art which celebrates Lincoln’s long & uniquely special place for trade and strongly features pictorial depictions of individual shops and traders from both the imagination and research. Also it educates about ‘how things used to be’ and what shopkeepers wore / sold.  

This is a celebratory piece of artwork reminding shops and traders that they have a place in the city’s rich heritage plus illustrating to visitors that Lincoln offers a proudly creative and historic tradition of interesting and engaging trade / shops. At a time when the high street is facing its own pressures, it focusses on how important shops are to culture and using fabric / stitching in a digital age reminds us of traditional techniques that many previously used. 

It is also a chance to be reminded of shop trades we no longer see… for example, Lincoln once had a specialist horse meat shop!

The piece is now available to be viewed within the newly refurbished Cornhill Market.

The piece was commissioned from The Fabric Quarter Limited in the Bailgate it comes with an Infographic which explains each part of the quilt.

Lincoln Creates fund aims to encourage artists and businesses to work together on visual art projects which will make Lincoln City Centre a more vibrant place to live, work or visit. Art projects can take the form of murals, sculptures, installations created using different materials and processes.