The development of visual and material culture practices across the interwar Anglo-Scottish border region provides a fertile field for rethinking assumptions inherent in that apparently contradictory term, ‘rural modernity’. This region, much of it seemingly remote and elemental, was widely perceived in the interwar period to be steeped in the romantic legacy of Walter Scott and the turbulent histories of the construction of Hadrian's Wall and later generations of wild Border Reivers. As such, its tangible and intangible heritage appealed to many tourists and incomers who were yearning for a simple, unsophisticated life and felt jaded, at least for a while, by fashionable metropolitan modernity. Nonetheless, across a period characterised by severe economic depression – most particularly in the north – a culture of production emerged to which notable artists and designers were to contribute, but which was fundamentally dependent on increasingly modernising traditions and the skills of resident makers and designers from each side of the border. Rural modernity, then, as this chapter will demonstrate, is an especially apt characterisation of the experience of many of those who inhabited this geographical region in the decades between the two world wars.

This chapter considers diverse forms of art, craft and design, but focuses most particularly on textile production. These forms are understood not simply as products of a specific space in the 1920s and 1930s, but as embedded in a system of rural–modern networks that in effect ‘produced’ the place identified elsewhere more generally as the Anglo-Scottish ‘borderlands’. The concern overall is to underline the dynamic nature of the social and material interactions between interwar artists, designers and manufacturers, the materials with which they engaged, the training and experience of workforces, and connections across rural and urban contexts (particularly where, as here, a city is fundamentally a large market town and surrounding villages are substantial sites of manufacture). This investigation reveals a process of cross-bordering resulting from a cultural and creative production that merged city and country, and modernism and modernity, brought traditional skills into line with new technologies, and combined national and international sources with local histories and forms of tangible and intangible heritage. In this regard, we see the interwar Anglo-Scottish borders as an avowedly modern space, despite frequent attempts to imagine it otherwise.