Threads of Memory
An immersive archive rooted in London's Weaver Line — where the stories of textile workers, migrants, and makers are kept alive through thread, sound, and conversation.
On the surface, it's a quilt. Underneath, it's an Operating System.
The Weaver Line — London's Overground route through Tottenham, Hackney, and the East End — was once the spine of a textile industry built by migrants and makers. Their stories shaped this city. Most were never recorded.
Threads of Memory started with one family's determination not to lose those stories. It grew into something bigger: proof of concept for what happens when cultural memory meets the Living Archive.
To the public, it's an immersive installation — a conductive textile map that triggers oral histories when touched. For Rainforest Studio, it's validation: evidence that messy, human, unstructured stories — hand-drawn maps, grandmother's voices, textile scans — can become a searchable, conversational archive that lasts.
The 3-Step Pipeline
From Story Collection to Public Retrieval
Structured Ingestion
Beyond standard recording. Using the Rainforest Standard schema, oral histories are captured alongside textile scans and location data — every story tagged with temporal and emotional metadata at the source.
The Vector Archive
Stories aren't just stored — they're understood. The system generates embeddings for every interview, linking visual patterns in cloth to themes in the audio (connecting "rough wool" to "hard labour", for example).
Multimodal Access
The archive doesn't sit in a dark room. It powers two live interfaces: a physical Tactile Interface (The Quilt) and a web-based Conversational Kiosk where anyone can ask questions and get answers — with citations — in plain language.
From Pilot to Platform
A two-phase build
The Pilot
The Quilt installation, an audio walk along the Weaver Line, and community craft and story workshops — centred on the women and migrant makers of Bruce Grove and Seven Sisters.
- —The Quilt — conductive textile sound installation
- —Weaver Line audio walk (QR-linked web app)
- —Community oral history recording workshops
Immersive Textile Storytelling Lab
A scaled immersive experience across Haringey's libraries, markets, and parks — expanding the archive into GPS-anchored exploration and interactive public installations.
- —Time-warp XR walk along the Weaver Line
- —Pop-up archive stations at Brick Lane and Spitalfields
- —Expanded community archive and climate lens
Early prototypes used static web files. They worked in the gallery — but the stories were invisible to the web.
For the pilot, we upgraded to a Server-Side Rendered (SSR) architecture with a full RAG layer underneath.
Why this matters
Every story in the archive is individually indexable by Google. Local history becomes discoverable to the global internet — not just the people in the room.
Get Involved
Experience The Quilt
Threads of Memory is currently in development in Haringey, London. The installation will be open to the public — a physical archive you can touch, hear, and move through.
Partner With Us
We're actively seeking cultural institutions, community organisations, arts councils, and borough partners for Phase One. If you work with community histories, we should talk.
Follow the Build
We document the process openly — the technical decisions, the community conversations, the things that don't work. Get in touch to follow along.
This is just the test run.
Threads of Memory is proof that overlooked stories don't have to stay that way. The Living Archive is ready. If you have communities, histories, and the will to make them last — let's talk.
Contact the Studio