The Cryséde shop, 2 Quiet Street - Museum of Bath at Work

“Cryséde is Synonymous to Beauty”

Recently I went to an exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro about the history of Cryséde textiles, and was fascinated to learn that one of their first dress shops was in Bath at 2 Quiet Street (currently an independent coffee café). Much of the information for this article is drawn from the Truro exhibition:

A photograph on the Bath in Time website (unknown photographer) shows Quiet Street, looking towards Milsom Street c.1930. It is captioned very precisely as ‘Monday 11.40am. Shops shown include Cryséde, silks, gowns and hand prints; L.E. Penwarden good class menswear; Walker & Ling, fancy drapers and ladies’ outfitters. A man in a delivery bicycle cycles past the photographer.’

Cryséde textile factory was started by Alec Walker in Newlyn (just to the west of Penzance); the first Cryséde silk dresses were made in 1919. Walker not only had a good business head, he was also a wildly creative and talented designer – the unique and unusual patterns (influenced by the French artist Raoul Dufy and often based on motifs from the local landscape) were printed on to silk fabric and quickly became popular.

Local women were employed as seamstresses and the prints were also available as fabric to buy by the yard. They were hand-printed and hand-finished, and priced accordingly. With a combination of canny advertising and a quality product, by 1921 there were three Cryséde shops in Cornwall (Penzance, St Ives and Falmouth) – and in 1922 they opened their first shop outside the county, in Bath.

With the success and expansion, the factory moved to St Ives with premises on The Island. St Ives Museum, at the foot of The Island, has a fascinating display of Cryséde textiles and can be viewed here.

The 1920s and 1930s were very successful, but there were boardroom clashes within the Cryséde company, leading to Alec Walker’s departure in 1938 and a failed attempt to move to a ‘production line’ model of manufacture. In 1939 Cryséde went into voluntary liquidation and almost all the shops closed – but Bath stayed open. The St Ives factory made camouflage nets during the war, and in 1940 Walker returned for a brief period but a year later there was a buy-out from another textiles firm and the original Cryséde was no more; in 1946 Cresta Silks acquired a controlling interest along with the few remaining shops.

The Cryséde shop (‘silks and gowns’) is listed in the Bath Directories for 1927-28, 1932, and 1935, and Janet Axten, textiles specialist and historian, notes that Bath was one of the shops that Cresta kept open after the war. The last advertisement that I can find is May 1950 (still using the Cryséde name):

These were not cheap, mass-produced garments; the price range in this advertisement equates roughly to £250-£650 (source: National Archives Currency Converter). I haven’t been able to find exactly when the Bath shop closed.