Workshop Wisdom – British Pasture

Alice Robinson and Sara Grady founded British Pasture Leather with a question that most people in the industry hadn’t thought to ask: where does leather actually come from?

Their work sits at the intersection of farming, craft, and material culture; connecting the people who raise the cattle with the designers who eventually work with the leather, and making visible something that the industry has long kept hidden.

Alice: British Pasture Leather is a leather production enterprise sourcing hides from cattle raised on pasture-based farms across the UK. Our mission is to produce leather that is genuinely connected to the farming system it comes from; working with farmers, abattoirs and tanneries to create an entirely British supply chain.

Sara: We work to define leather as an agricultural product. Most mainstream leather production has a lot of obscurity built into it; farmers rarely know where the hides of their animals end up, and designers have almost no insight into where their material originated or the farming practices behind it. We came to this looking at both sides of that question: what does this mean for farmers, and what does it mean for designers? And how do we change it?

Sara: We have a space in Northamptonshire, which we found because it sits adjacent to the finishing facility where the final stages of our leather production take place. The tanning happens at a tannery in Bristol, and the unfinished hides then move to this unit to be finished in smaller batches next door. It was a very fortunate discovery, a close and collaborative relationship with the facility next door is really why we took the space.

Alice: It’s in a state of revival and reanimation; a beautiful old industrial space with north-facing lights and a lot of character. It’s also been really vital for us to have somewhere we can bring designers, makers, students, and others in the leather industry together to share knowledge. Everyone always says, “Oh my god, what a beautiful space” — and then you try being there in winter.

Alice: There is no usual day. Whenever we go up to Northamptonshire it’s for many different reasons; reviewing styles before a custom project, meeting with Greg who runs the facility next door, packing orders. There’s always a lot to do, but never a standard rhythm.

Sara: So much of our work involves coordinating across a wide geographical spread. But the best days are when we’re actually handling the leather itself. There’s something very powerful about that material. Someone once said that leather represents potential, because it has the potential to become so many different things. I love those moments when we’re with our leather stock, sitting at that point where so much work has come before and there’s still so much possibility ahead.

Alice: We keep saying we need a speaker at the unit, but we don’t have one, and when we’re there together we’re usually talking too much anyway. On my own, it’s The Rest Is History. That’s my go-to at all times.

Sara: Music of all genres, but when I’m really focused I need something instrumental. I get so involved in music that too many words becomes too much alongside everything else going on in my head.

Alice: My head of programme at my MA, Zowie Broach, really changed how I thought about what I was doing. She taught us that fashion is political, nuanced, a privilege to be involved in, and that everything should be interrogated. That went beyond being passionate about making and into thinking much more deeply about what it means to do that in the space of fashion.

Sara: The story that stays with me is of cheesemakers in Vermont who realised the artisan cheese industry couldn’t thrive without a shared affinage facility, so they built one. One piece of shared infrastructure catalysed an entire ecosystem of makers. That idea of opening things up rather than staying separate has stayed with me.

Sara: We’re really going against the grain, pardon the pun, in how we define quality in leather. Conventional notions of quality are built around uniformity and standardisation. We’ve taken the opposite approach: embracing the inherent character of the material, rather than concealing or erasing it. That resonates with things I care about more broadly; the distinctiveness of place, of food, of material culture. Not losing the true story of what something actually is.

Alice: I’ve always been drawn to the idea of objects as artefacts; things from another place and another time that hold stories within them. That’s what drew me to leather in the first place. I wanted to learn from it, to understand its connection and provenance. How you storytell through a material, how you create connection through it. That’s something I think about constantly.

Alice: My awl. It’s been with me for about 15 years. You can use it for everything; pattern making, leather work, opening parcels. It has a wooden handle and a very pointy end and it goes everywhere with me. Sarah got stabbed by it last week, which slightly dampened my enthusiasm, but I stand by it.

Sara: A nice fresh, sharp scalpel blade. Wrangling leather is something Alice and I have had to learn; these are big, unwieldy pieces of material and cutting them well takes practice. When you get it right, it’s very satisfying.

That said, our real answer is probably the horses. When we took on the unit, we were lucky to be able to adopt the old wooden horses and trolleys from a tannery that was closing in Yeovil. These things simply aren’t manufactured anymore. They’re beautiful old pieces of kit, and without them we couldn’t move any material around the factory at all.

Alice: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. I don’t see the point in doing something half-heartedly. I love attention to detail. Perfection might be the enemy of progress, but doing things well, that I believe in.


Sara: I love the poetry of Mary Oliver. She has a poem called Instructions for Living a Life – “pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.” That stays with me.

Alice: Keep your hands dirty. Stay positive. Don’t stay in your lane, but also don’t look over other people’s shoulders. Comparing yourself to where other people are is one of the most unproductive things you can do. Know your context, know your mission, and stay tenacious in moving through it.

Sara: Ask questions. Curiosity is what brought us both into this work and keeps us going. Genuinely being interested in things is a way to show care, and I think it’s one of the most powerful things you can bring to any kind of making.

Sara: I stopped buying new clothes a while ago. I really only want to wear things from brands producing clothing with integrity. Most of what I own is old and needs mending, which I find oddly freeing. There’s a utilitarian aspect to the work Alice and I do that I’ve embraced, dressing for ease and function feels right.

Alice: I dress for ease and function too, and I love handme-downs. My last pair of jeans were my dad’s; he’d had them for at least 20 years before they came to me. They’ve had darts put in, they’ve been sewn up countless times. They’re completely moulded to my body now. I like to wear things that have been around long enough to have a story attached to them; why you came to own them in the first place, and why you’re still so happy wearing them years later. Things that were just made better.