Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant on his Community Clothing mission to boost the textile industry

“One of the cameramen was wearing a pair of Japanese workwear trousers that I really liked, so I took a couple of pictures and we did our own version,” he says.

The 2024 series, expected to air late spring, is done and dusted, having been filmed last year at Sunny Bank Mills at Farsley in Leeds. “Things pop up that really surprise and delight me, and I think, well, that’s such a nice idea. I can take a bit of that and bring it into my own work,” he says.

His own work, his day job, is Community Clothing, which sells British-made designs - jeans and utility trousers, knitwear, jackets, coats, socks, dresses, shirts and more - for a fraction of the price of other premium brands.

But Community Clothing is much, much more than a brand. He founded it after receiving an email telling him that one of his valued suppliers, Cookson & Clegg, a Blackburn clothing mill established in 1860, was about to close with the loss of 60 jobs. So he bought it and set about thinking how to save other textile and clothing jobs. In 2016, following a crowdfunding campaign, Community Clothing was born and now works with 45 factories across the UK.

There are two fundamental CC goals, Patrick says. “The first one is to create and sustain jobs in the UK textile-making regions, of which Yorkshire is probably the biggest, alongside neighbouring Lancashire, the Scottish Borders and the Midlands.

“Even 50 years ago there were 1.5 million people employed in textiles, and now there are less than 100,000,” he says. “Within my lifetime we have lost a million and a half really good jobs, jobs where people worked with their hands and their minds. People of all backgrounds, all academic abilities, had something to do that was meaningful and economically sustainable and gave them a sense of pride and structure to their lives, and that is so fundamentally important to the way we rebuild our country, because I think it is fairly broken at the moment.”

These mills were connected with the community, as some still are, like A Hainsworth, which makes fabrics for Community Clothing. Patrick says: “If we buy everything from Amazon, where does that money go? Virtually none of it comes back into our local economy and almost none of it into our national economy.”.

The second CC goal is to make quality clothes that people can afford. “Most clothing businesses operate on a model where, if something costs a tenner to make, they will sell it for £55,” Patrick says. “At the designer end of the clothing world, it’s more like, if it costs a tenner, they sell it for £100. We make for a tenner and charge £17.”

CC can do this because it has a small team at HQ (five full-time staff, including Patrick, and five part-time) and does not have the huge marketing, retail, wholesale, design and development costs of other brands. There are no sales and no discounts. The products are sold online and stay the same, broadly, with perhaps new colours, although there is a new collection of Welsh-made underwear and a super-cool new plastic-free sportswear collection, the fruit of a five-year project, making sure that everything, including the stretch aspects and stitching threads, are biodegradable.

Patrick says: “We are not going to get people to switch from highly noxious stuff into something good if it doesn’t look good. People go to the gym for a reason.”

Patrick has always been active and sporty himself. Born in 1972 in Edinburgh (his mother worked at the university and his father managed nightclub bands before becoming an accountant), he studied Engineering and Material Science at the University of Leeds and went to Oxford for a Masters in Business Administration (he wrote his thesis on Burberry’s resurgence).

Read how prestige brand TOAST supports Yorkshire manufacturers

He began in textiles at Savile Row tailors Norton & Sons, reviving its tradition of using the best cloths, sourced from British mills he still works with today. In 2009 he relaunched ready-to-wear brand E Tautz and was awarded Menswear Designer of the Year at the 2010 British Fashion Awards.

E Tautz style Field Trousers, based on 1950s US military field trousers, are now sold at CC, sewn on the same machines at Cookson & Clegg, from the same Brisbane Moss cotton twill.

To say that Patrick has a lot on at the moment is quite the understatement. He is in the process of moving to Yorkshire, having reached the final stages of renovating a property not far from Settle. He is also writing two books, one a sewing book teaching Savile Row methods, and one about the philosophy behind Community Clothing, due to be published soon by Harper Collins.

He cannot give too much away about the new series of The Great British Sewing Bee, but there will be a guest judge for India Week. “It always amazes me that we are able to continually find brilliant new challenges for the contestants,” he says. “We expect them to be really good, and really fun people, and really creative and technically gifted, but it's always a great pleasure to spend all of those days with those people.

“People love the show, but it's important, too. If we don’t understand how our clothes are made, and we don’t know about textiles and French seams, then we can’t make sensible choices about our clothing.”

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