Cotton spinning and weaving, told earlier in this section, were only the trunk of the west of Scotland’s textile tree. The branches reached everywhere — and several of them conquered world markets outright, long after King Cotton’s own crown had slipped.
Thread was the empire’s empire. The Coats and Clark dynasties of neighbouring Paisley industrialised sewing thread, then globalised it: by the late nineteenth century J. & P. Coats, headquartered on the Clyde’s doorstep with mills on every continent, held something close to a world monopoly and ranked among the largest companies on earth — Paisley money endowing galleries, churches and observatories across the region. Every hem on the planet, more or less, paid the west of Scotland a farthing.
Colour and pattern were Glasgow trades too. The Vale of Leven, down the Clyde, became the world capital of Turkey red — the brilliant, fast scarlet whose dyeing and printing works employed thousands and shipped bales of blazing cloth to India and beyond, patterned for their markets. Ayrshire’s needlewomen, organised from Glasgow warehouses, produced the exquisite ‘sewed muslin’ whitework that trimmed the world’s christenings; and Paisley gave its name, via imitation Kashmir shawls, to a pattern that has never gone out of production since.
The city’s own showpiece wove underfoot: James Templeton & Co’s carpets, from the Doge’s Palace factory on Glasgow Green met in the Architecture pages, furnished parliaments, liners — Clyde-built ships walking on Glasgow pile — picture palaces and presidential floors, with Axminsters and chenilles that made Templeton’s a world name. Around all these worked the wholesale clothing and drapery warehouses of the city centre — great houses like Arthur & Co. whose ‘soft goods’ empires supplied shops across the empire and gave the Merchant City’s buildings their later Victorian use.
The long unravelling came with the twentieth century — synthetic dyes undercutting Turkey red, imperial markets industrialising, then the general post-war retreat — and the mills, print-fields and warehouses closed or converted one by one; Templeton’s wove its last in 1980. What survives is threads in every sense: Coats, remarkably, remains a world thread company; the warehouses are flats and offices; and the patterns — a Paisley swirl, a Turkey red quilt in a museum case — carry the trade’s memory lightly around the world.