One of the people I'm painting for Drawn to the Boro grew up in Greenock, just along the Clyde from Paisley. As a young man, Leonard moved to Middlesbrough to begin his engineering career. But in the 1970s and 80s a series of recessions struck the North East with devastating force, and Leonard and his family had to make tough choices about where to live and work. Like my own family, they went wherever the work led them. That constant movement made me think of the paisley motif: a pattern named after the town near where Leonard grew up, and one that has also travelled far from home

Most of us could draw its outline without thinking: a rounded teardrop, its tip curled to one side. Paisley has had many names and forms. Its true origin is uncertain, but in the late 1500s and 1600s, Jesuits and traders brought European herbals (illustrated plant books) to the Mughal court. Mughal artists studied them, and the flowering plant, including the roots, found its way into the shawls of Kashmir. Over two centuries, it became the shape we know. Over time, the plant became a bouquet, then a flowering bush that tapered into a cone, its topmost bloom tipping over.

Some say it’s a cypress, an ancient Persian symbol of life and endurance. Others see a flame, a mango, or the bud from a palm tree. I like to think it’s all of these - a shape passed through so many hands it has become a chameleon.

Paisleys arrived in Britain on shawls from Kashmir, woven from the soft undercoat of goats living high on the plateaus of Tibet and Ladakh. The finest shawls took months, even years, to make, and some were woven in hundreds of pieces and joined by needleworkers with almost invisible seams. In the early 1820s, over 130,000 people worked in the trade.

Officers of the East India Company brought these shawls home in the late eighteenth century, and fashionable Europe was captivated. The Empress Josephine is said to have owned around four hundred. A genuine Kashmir shawl could cost £200 or more, something like £35,000 in today's money, so Britain began to copy them. Edinburgh made the first recorded imitation in 1767. Paisley followed some forty years later, and from the 1820s its weavers were using the Jacquard loom, which read the pattern from punched cards. A Paisley copy might sell for as little as £3, about £400 today.

That price gap had real consequences in Kashmir. Shawls that took months by hand had to compete with copies sold at a fraction of the price. 

Paisley's fortunes were anything but steady. Shawls were a luxury, and when a financial crisis hit Britain in the early 1840s the market fell away. By December 1841, The Spectator reported, 13,071 people in Paisley were relying on relief, and at least 500 families were asking to be sent to Australia or Canada. More than half the town's manufacturers failed, and in 1843 the town itself was declared bankrupt. In the middle of all this, in 1842, Queen Victoria bought seventeen Paisley shawls and wore them in public. Her endorsement made them fashionable again, and the trade recovered. Through the late 1840s and 1850s, its best years, more than 7,000 weavers worked in Paisley, increasingly in larger workshops, and their prices were so low that Edinburgh gave up making shawls altogether.

The end, when it came, was down to fashion. In the 1870s the wide crinoline gave way to the bustle, and a great square shawl will not sit over a bustle. Cheaper printed copies had flooded the market too. Paisley turned instead to cotton thread, and Coats thread from Paisley was exported worldwide. In Kashmir, the collapse in European demand was followed by famine from 1877 to 1879, and many weavers left for Punjab to follow the work.