‘The high street will never be the same again - and that’s not a bad thing’ says Barnsley fashion pioneer Rita Britton

This season, Rita Britton is mostly wearing fine cashmere sweaters and loose gabardine trousers from her own collection. So, it seems, are a surprising number of cool locked-down Londoners. Because, although the Barnsley shop is shut for now, Nomad Atelier is selling well from its website, and Rita knows why. She has been analysing the websites selling high-end designer fashion.

“It’s very evident that the top end of the market is not selling their expensive summer clothing, because they are not going on expensive summer holidays,” she says. “What is happening with all that stock? What’s happening to the companies providing them with the stock? The big boys are probably going to ride this one out but it’s going to take a lot of people with it.”

The high street, she believes, will never be the same again, with perhaps just three or four big names surviving. “And maybe that’s not a bad thing,” she says. “Maybe that needed to happen because it was getting ridiculous. We were bringing the bloody planet down.

“So where does that leave us, sitting where nobody else sits, manufacturing and designing our own range?”

London’s high-end shoppers are looking for something else – which is where Nomad Atelier comes in. Rita says: “Because, I suppose, I am a Barnsley and Yorkshire lass, there has always been a sense of practicality about the clothes that we do. Yes, they are beautiful silk shirts but they go in a washing machine. People are not coming out to shop but they want our weekend pants and our oversized cashmere sweater because they are not teetering round their apartment in London in high heel shoes and tight little skirts, are they?”

Rita Britton is quite used to upending the style status quo. In 1967, she put Barnsley on the fashion map when she opened the legendary Pollyanna on Shambles Street. She had persuaded her father, a lorry driver, to take her to London to buy from Mary Quant and was selling to friends at the Star Paper Mill in Barnsley, where she had worked since she was 15.

In the 1980s, she brought avant-garde labels to the North for the first time, including Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons. In 1991 she moved to a two-storey shop at Market Hill. Customers came from afar, increasingly to seek out Rita’s own collection, Nomad, launched in the late Nineties.

Pollyanna closed in 2014, after Rita survived a brain haemorrhage and a heart attack. In September that year, aged 70, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by Drapers. Dismissing any notion of retirement, she restored The Tobacco Warehouse in George Yard, Barnsley, as Nomad’s new home. In 2015, it opened as a shop with a gallery and cafe.

It is closed for now, but Rita, who lives near Barnsley with husband, Geoff (they have three grown-up sons), goes to dispatch orders, made in isolation by one of her team of skilled local pattern cutters and machinists - women who used to work in South Yorkshire’s manufacturing industry. She says they could be the key to its revival.

“There are still women out there – in their early 60s – who were SR Gent’s sample machinists. We’re right at the very end of being able to pull it back. This has been a bee in my bonnet for years, getting manufacturing back in this country, because there has never been a better time to do it.”

Rita embraces digital age skills, too, as part of a project to equip the Nomad Atelier website with new marketing tools, so online customers will see what they will look like in the clothes before they buy. It’s a Future Fashion Factory collaboration between businesses and the Universities of Leeds, Huddersfield and the Royal College of Art. And she is also creating an online-only sister brand – “very similar styling to Nomad but much less expensive,” she says. Discounting Nomad sweaters brought new customers, suggesting a market was there. The new line will use less expensive cloth, with everything still made in Barnsley.

“It will be called Perfect. So if you ring up, the phone will get answered ‘Hello, Perfect’,” she says. She has signed up to study photography at Barnsley College, to work on her websites. “I think that what will come out of this is a lot of practical things,” she adds.

The course starts in September, by which time, Rita hopes, the world will be back to some sort of normal, maybe improved. She has lived in the same house for 47 years and marvels at the changes she sees around her. “What’s amazing just now is the clarity of the air,” she says. “I hope we learn from all this.”

Nomad Atelier is at George Yard, Barnsley, and on www.nomadatelier.co.uk

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