On Palm Sunday 2026 (29th March 2026), This is Haslemere attended the blessing of the altar frontal at St. Christopher’s Church in Haslemere. In the church service, Rev Chris Bessant stated:

“Today sees a rare event in the life of a church, the blessing of an Altar Frontal. Over the last year, an aged and very special frontal has been restored to working use, since its creation back in early 1900s. The Peasant Altar Frontal "Vineyard" was designed by Edmund Hunter and woven in Haslemere especially for St. Christopher's church and is unique of its kind. It is made of cream linen with long stitch wool embroidery. The design includes birds, vines and grapes and is very typical of his work. The frontal was given to our church in 1903, not many years after St. Christopher's was built in a style influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement.”

“In its rustic nature, the frontal is very well suited to being set in a season such as Lent, where basic linen or home-spun colours reflect our penitential attitude. Palm Sunday sees the completion of Lent and our movement into Holy Week, being also a special 'high day' quite fitting for this moment. We ourselves are blessed to share this special event on such an important day.”

“Our deepest thanks are due to Sonia Lee and Tim Purdue, and the St. Christopher's church fabric team for making this possible. Special thanks are also offered to the Friends of Haslemere Parish, for their interest in funding this project.”

The altar frontal was restored by Sonia Lee who trained at The Royal School of Needlework. She told This is Haslemere that she received the altar frontal for restoration in May 2025 and brought it back to the church in January 2026. This meant that she had worked on it for around seven months. The woven thread is wool. It is originally a woven piece with the wool going from left to right (the weft) and then there is a thread that goes from the top to the bottom (the warp) which was really brittle and it was coming apart. The frontal was also torn in quite a lot of places especially in the middle section and on the right hand side. This is where people were handling it to hook it onto the altar. It had also stretched over time and there were threads holding it together in the backing. In addition, where it had stretched, it had also sagged. Sonia took the backing off and started to clean it up with quite a few gentle hoovers. There was a hundred and twenty years’ worth of dust in there that needed to be removed.

Sonia then cleaned it up before she took the back off. She said if you normally have something with a hole in it, you would attach a fabric patch on the back and then you would stitch the piece to the patch. However, because it was more or less torn all over, she attached it to one large piece of fabric so it is basically one large calico patch behind the whole piece. Then Sonia conducted surface couching and stitched the whole piece down, lines upon lines all handstitched from top to bottom with standard polyester sewing thread. Sometimes she was able to use existing loose threads of wool to help with the repair. Amazingly, there were only five or six moth holes and she has managed to invisibly mend those.

The detail in the frontal is of wool and entirely woven from left to right. The weavers would have brought the different colours to the top of the loom to create the different patterns. What was difficult for Sonia where there was a huge hole was to restore, for example, the green grapes, at exactly the right height. Her restoration did not involve re-weaving; it involved repairing it and attaching the cloth to the calico patch at the back. Her job was to conserve the frontal not to create a perfect finish. Sonia told us it was such a privilege to conserve this 120-year-old piece.

Sonia used some 60,000 hand stitches to conserve the altar frontal with over 1.2km of thread. To visualise, that is roughly the distance from St Christopher’s to College Hill where the Weaving House was located.

After the church service, Richard Hunter, great grandson of Edmund Hunter was invited to speak. This is his talk in full:

"Thank you all very much tor inviting me here today and I am indeed delighted to be here to witness the wonderful restoration of this beautiful altar frontal designed by my great-grandfather Edmund Hunter and woven here in Haslemere at his handweaving works in Collage Hill.

It was a hundred and twenty five years ago that Edmund and his wife Dorothea with their two small boys Ralph aged three and Alec aged two arrived here.

They were on a crusade to help in the revival of the craft of handweaving which had been in decline through the relentless growth of mechanisation in the textile industry. They saw the new textiles as bland and without artistic merit or human input and decried the loss of the ancient craft.

They were an interesting couple who met and married in Bedford Park, West London. Dorothea was charismatic, an Irish home ruler, suffragist and possibly an early socialist. Edmund would have described himself as a craftsman, artist and designer and he saw life through the creative eyes of an artist.

In Bedford Park they had gathered around them an interesting circle of writers, artists and free thinkers amongst whom was Dorothea's distant cousin the poet WB Yeats. And it was with Yeats that they explored a world of mysticism, theosophy and the esoteric. It was these ideas and themes that were to greatly influence Edmund as an artist and designer.

Edmund and Dorothea had heard about Haslemere from Bedford Park friends. It had become something of a Mecca for creatives, artists and radicals. HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw were already weekenders and others had moved here.

And there was already The Peasant Arts Society established by Godfrey and Ethel Blount around which had gathered a group of idealistic craft revival businesses in Haslemere. And not just that. Luther Hooper the author of a number of books on handweaving and acknowledged expert lived here. Serendipity!

Edmund Hunter and Luther Hooper went into business together. The Hunters raised family funds to buy the looms they needed and establish their light and airy premises on College Hill in Haslemere. They also found perhaps five dislocated hand weavers in the Spitalfields tradition whom they enticed to Haslemere and gave employment.

Soon the St. Edmundsbury Weaving Works was flourishing transposing Edmund’s very singular designs full of symbolism into rich silk fabric, their detail brought out in gold, silver and metal threads.

The business relationship with Luther Hooper didn’t last but the firm was on its way. They exhibited at a number of craft and trade exhibitions including at The Royal Albert Hall where they won gold medals for their work over a number of years. They also won a Silver Commendation at the famous St. Louis Exposition in the USA in 1903.

Queen Alexandra ordered frontals for the royal chapels - the rich red frontal with detail in gold thread is still used to this day at the Chapel Royal. For St Paul's Cathedral, they supplied a magnificent Lenten frontal in blue silk with gold detail and again this is still used at the Cathedral at Lent.

The firm was frequently in the press and accolades came from far and wide.

Then around 1907 they were approached by Burberry who wanted silk linings for their famous trenchcoats and jackets. But, for this, St Edmundsbury Weavers would need jacquard frames and electricity. There just wasn't enough space in College Hill and little chance of getting electricity to their small weaving house.

Edmund and Dorothea heard about the new Letchworth Garden City where there was space and lots of it and electricity in the streets. There was no question they would have to go for it and in 1908 they moved their business and lives, their ready-made and bespoke business premises and new home in Letchworth where the business would flourish for another 20 years.

But it was in Haslemere that the adventure had started. A place that was a crucible of energy and creativity that set them on their way.

One last thing…yesterday, going through all family papers, I came across a letter dated September 18th 1903 from The Reverend George Aitken, Rector of this parish, thanking Edmund and Dorothea for the gift of a frontal for St Christopher’s that would be cherished for years to come. This might well be this frontal, Vineyard!”

To read more about Edmund Hunter and this altar frontal, check out Catherine Eyre’s Peasant Arts blog here:

Catherine Eyre’s book Rustic Renaissance: The Haslemere Peasant Arts Movement is available to purchase at Haslemere Museum.

To read more about St. Edmundsbury Weaving Works, visit their website here.

The altar frontal will be at St. Christopher’s Church throughout Easter Week and we encourage you to go there to see this beautifully restored work.