Made to Mend What a household fixed, and how many times

When the Merrin house was cleared in 2009, the people sorting it kept finding the same thing. A teapot lid held on with a knife rivet. A sock darned in three greys. An apron that was more patch than apron. Almost nothing in the house was in the condition it had been sold in, and almost nothing had been thrown away.

Made to Mend is about those repairs. Not the objects, which are ordinary, but what was done to them, by whom and how often. Every label in the exhibition carries a second line, under what the thing cost new: what the mend cost, and who did it, when we know.

Mending was a skill, not a hobby

In a house where boots cost a week’s wages, mending was not thrift for its own sake. Everybody learned it. The cobbler’s last in the long case has three feet, for a man’s, a woman’s and a child’s shoe, and the child’s foot is the most worn. Ada Merrin darned on Sunday evenings. Her son Joseph riveted the teapot lid at sixteen, in the works, with a rivet meant for a knife handle.

Some repairs were paid for. A china mender came round the streets with a bow drill and a bag of staples, and the plate at the start of the exhibition shows his work: three pieces, eleven staples, and a mend that cost more than the plate.

The mend that wasn’t discussed

The teapot is the object people stop at longest. Its lid was riveted in 1953 and glued again in the 1970s, by someone who didn’t trust the rivet. We don’t know who. Nobody in the family remembered doing it, and nobody remembered it being done. Two generations mended the same lid without, as far as we can tell, ever mentioning it to each other.

That is most of what this exhibition is about. Repairs in a house like this were rarely talked about. They were done on a Sunday evening, or at the works bench on a Saturday, and then the thing went back on the shelf.

Bring something

On the second Saturday of each month Nell Carver runs a darning table in the gallery, with wool, needles and copies of Ada’s darning mushroom. Bring a sock. The exhibition ends on 1 March 2027.