Help Keep The Wool Hub Spinning for Our Community!

Aim

To keep the Wool Hub open, offering friendly textile craft tuition and adding in new offers, making sure that everyone can join in.

THE WOOL HUB

A space where everyone belongs

In the heart of Buckfastleigh, Devon, there's a place where something quietly remarkable happens every single weekday. People who might otherwise spend the day alone at home get out of the house and walk down to the Hub, pick up some needles, and find themselves part of something. A conversation starts. A skill is passed on. A person who came in anxious leaves feeling lighter.

This is The Wool Hub. 

🐑  Rooted in thousands of years of wool

Buckfastleigh has been a wool town since long before anyone was counting. Fleece was spun and woven in this Devon valley for millennia before the mills arrived and long after they fell quiet. That heritage is in the soil here, in the names of the streets, in the stories of the people.

Today, parts of our town are among the 15% most deprived areas in England. Isolation, loneliness, and lack of opportunity to get out and join in are real and daily challenges for many of our neighbours. The Wool Hub was founded in 2023 by a group of experienced wool crafters — known locally as the Woolly Nanas — to respond to exactly that. With initial support from the National Lottery, we opened our doors and haven't looked back.

🧶  What happens here

Our community craft space is open every weekday, and it welcomes absolutely everyone. Spinning, weaving, natural dyeing, knitting, felting, crochet, whatever your interest or ability, there's a place for you. We specifically support people of all ages, those living with physical or learning disabilities, neurodivergent visitors, and people experiencing poor mental health.

Central to its mission is the restoration of practical fibre skills that carry genuine economic value. Knowing how to spin, weave and knit is not merely a creative pursuit, it is a form of financial resilience. A person who can make and mend clothing, produce household textiles, and work with raw natural fibres has measurably reduced dependence on fast fashion and imported goods. In a time of rising living costs, these are skills with a direct and tangible impact on household budgets. The ability to produce or repair a warm garment, a blanket or a pair of socks represents real money saved, week after week, year after year.

This dimension of The Wool Hub’s work is also inseparable from the challenge of climate adaptation. The fashion industry is one of the most polluting on earth. Fast fashion, cheap, disposable, globally shipped, generates enormous carbon emissions and waste. The skills taught at The Wool Hub offer an alternative rooted in the oldest of human practices: using what the land provides, making things to last, and repairing rather than discarding. Dartmoor’s sheep produce fleece every year. Learning to transform that fleece into something useful is an act of sustainability in the most literal sense, a closed loop between landscape, animal, craft and community.

The Wool Hub is not a nostalgic project. It is a forward-looking one. By connecting people to ancient skills and to the moorland heritage on their doorstep, it equips a community to be more self-sufficient, more connected, to move more and to be more resilient, in the face of economic hardship and a changing climate alike.

Local Projects

We work with Buckfastleigh Food Bank, the Social Supermarket, Buckfastleigh Library, Moorlands Community Caring, local sheep farmers, the Share Shed lending library of tools and equipment and we've delivered the Moor Threads community weaving project for the Moor Imagination Centre and the Two MoorsPine Marten Project for Devon Wildlife Trust. Our participants are currently knitting baby blankets at the request of Buckfastleigh Medical Centre to give to new mothers, a handmade welcome, made with time and care, by people who know what it means to need a community around you.

And then there's our own little flock. Nine sheep, including Pixie, a Soay, and Damsel, a Hebridean, provide a range of beautiful fleeces that go directly into our craft sessions. Their care is supported by local people who enjoy coming out to be with the sheep. From living animal to finished textile, right here in Buckfastleigh.

 It doesn't get more sustainable than that.

🌿  More than craft — it's preventative care

The evidence for craft-based community activity is compelling. Regular participation reduces loneliness, lowers anxiety, builds confidence, and gives people a reason to leave the house. For many of our visitors, The Wool Hub is not just hobby but a lifeline.

When an older person comes in feeling invisible, and leaves two hours later having taught a teenager to spin, something profound has happened. Skills that might otherwise be lost are carried forward. A young person discovers patience and pride. An elder feels seen and valued. This is intergenerational wellbeing in action and it happens here, quietly, every day.

💚  Why your support matters now

Our founding grant has carried us this far. To keep our doors open, and keep our sessions accessible to everyone regardless of income, we need to build a more sustainable base of community support.

Your donation will go directly towards:

• Keeping the space open — rent, heating, and the basics that make it possible
• Materials and equipment — wheels, looms, yarn, and fibres for every session
• Accessible, low-cost and subsidised sessions — so that cost is never a barrier to joining in.
• Launching a paid internship -  for a young person from our community to move from participant to practitioner, learning traditional wool processing skills to enable them to create their own designed garments and products, plus develop a tailored business plan. 
• Launching a new offer for our participants without transport to visit our sheep and to take gentle walks on the nearby moorland

 Every pound keeps us spinning.

🙏  Please come and be part of it

Whether you can give £5 or £500, you'll have our deepest gratitude — and a place at our table whenever you want it. Share this page, visit us in Buckfastleigh, or follow us on Instagram and Facebook to see what we're making.

Thank you for helping keep Buckfastleigh's wool heritage alive — for everyone.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 7th July 2026 at 11:28am