At last, there are signs of early summer here. So this week we have Stanley Spencer's "pot-boilers", as he called his paintings of gardens and local Cookham views. At this time of year, he would wheel out his pram full of art materials, and capture in exquisite detail his neighbours' plants. This is Wisteria (c1940, Harris Museum and Art Gallery).

The fabrics Shirley Craven designed in the 1960s such as 'Kaplan' (1961) often have the quality of abstract art, pieces of which today might be framed, so rare have they become. Sadly, this is true of so many furnishing textiles, often designed by women, whose value was fully not appreciated at the time. More recently, there has been a greater effort to collect and archive these precious fabrics; accounts can be found in books by Lesley Jackson, including her book on Shirley Craven, and on the Haptic & Hue podcast.

This is Golden Wheat (1959), the first design by Althea McNish (1924-1920) for Hull Traders. Printed on heavy cotton satin in four colourways, it was so popular that it stayed in production until the 1970s. It was inspired by a visit in 1957 to see her RCA tutor, Edward Bawden, in Great Bardfield. In the fields nearby, she encountered a wheat field for the first time, which for her recalled sugar cane plantations in Trinidad. The "dazzling contrasting colours...movement and expressive lines" of her work have been celebrated in recent exhibitions at the  William Morris Gallery and The Whitworth. 

The Whitworth exhibition, which is open until May 2025, focusses on Shirley Craven, but the V&A also has many of her designs and others for Hull Traders Ltd. In 1959 the company was taken over by Peter Neubert and started trading under the name of Time Present Fabrics with an egg-timer logo (this is one of their strikingly modern 1960s sample books). It was committed to hand screen-printing which enabled short runs and experimentation with pigment dyes and deep colours. This in turn attracted talented artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi as well as the bright, young textile designers recruited from art colleges. 

There is a fine exhibition (until May 2025) of fabrics designed by Shirley Craven (b.1934) at The Whitworth in Manchester, which has an exceptionally good textile collection. It features many of her 1960s designs for Hull Traders, which was co-founded in 1957 by Tristram Hull. It is just a coincidence that Shirley Craven and Pat Albeck, who also designed for them, were both from Hull and studied at Hull School of Art before the RCA. This is 'Simple Solar' (1967), a hand screen-printed cotton satin by Shirley Craven. 

English Heritage might argue that Monica Dickens spent thirty years in the USA but, heaven knows, there are many blue plaques on houses where eminent men stayed only a year or two (eg Lenin in 1908). In fact, Monica Dickens was a true Londoner and set parts of Mariana and The Winds of Heaven in London. She was also a prolific, immensely popular author of both non-fiction and fiction, including the Follyfoot series. How could she not deserve a plaque? Nominations can be submitted here.

Florence White was born in Peckham and grew up in South London. She wrote the classic and highly influential Good Things in England, a manifesto for the merits of English cookery. In 1926 she set up the English Folk Cookery Association to further ensure that traditional recipes which had been passed down, but not in written form, were not lost. Her book is still one of the most important primary sources for those interested in English culinary history.