For the modernist designer Enid Marx, folk art, or what she called ‘popular art’, was ‘hard to define though easy enough to recognise when seen’. Marx and her partner, the historian Margaret Lambert, collected samplers, Staffordshire flatbacks, lustrewares, ship’s figureheads, boldly carved animals made for fairground merry-go-rounds, pub signs,
theatrical tinsel pictures, bargee art, puppets, patchworks and quilting – now forming the impressive Marx–Lambert Collection at Compton Verney. Rag rugs – very much a form of popular art – were overlooked by them, however. They were also ignored in the 2014 Tate Britain show ‘British Folk Art’. Their ephemerality was a factor: in her excellent book Rag Rugs of England and America, Emma Tennant describes such rugs starting off in the best room, then being dispatched to the kitchen, before finally being sent out the back door to the dog kennel or the potato patch, where they were unlikely to survive. 

Made of cut-up strips of cast-off clothing poked or hooked through a hessian backing, rag rugs originated in the late 19th century, when recycling was routine for most of the population. Woollies were unpicked and knitted up again, collars and cuffs were turned, and darning and patching were an absolute necessity. The feminist artist Kate Walker learned about rag-rug making from her mother and grandmother. ‘In those days your work was used, trodden on, or worn right out, like you yourself,’ she explained in 1987. For her mother and grandmother, rag rugs ‘stank of poverty’; Walker felt that to admire such craftwork as a species of art was bogus. But for Richard Hoggart, in his classic study The Uses of
Literacy, based on his interwar childhood in Leeds, a rag rug on the hearth was part of a rosier picture. Made with simple bold patterns, often plain with a bright circle or diamond at the centre, rag rugs, along with a good fire and plenty of homemade food, symbolised for him everything that was cosy and safe about an economically run working-class home.

Jovan Nicholson’s beautifully illustrated book (accompanying an exhibition at MIMA, Middlesborough, ending on 23 March 2025) takes us in a different direction, into an essentially rural world where, in the 1920s, his grandmother Winifred Nicholson ‘discovered’ the rag rugs Marx had overlooked. Soon after Winifred and her husband, Ben Nicholson,