Among Earlsdon’s first residents in 1852 was a small number of people engaged in the ribbon weaving industry. Ribbon weaving was at the time the most important industry in Coventry, employing some 10,000 people and producing more ribbon than any other area of the country. Most of those moving to Earlsdon, however, were employed in the much better paid watchmaking industry; few weavers could afford the new estate.
Two weaving families did buy plots and build houses — those of George Pool and David Green — in what was then Cromwell Street (now Berkeley Road South). They built typical weavers’ three-storey homes with top shops where, to take the weight of heavy looms, the floors were reinforced. Needing as much daylight as possible, and unlike the more discreet watchmakers, the weavers placed their large top-shop windows on the front of the house, making their trade visible to every passer-by. These two houses are still lived in today.
By 1861, the 1861 Census shows George Pool, aged 46, with his wife Anne and two children, and next door David Green, aged 49, with his wife Elizabeth and four children. Apart from these two families there were twenty-six others on the estate in the trade, some working in a specially built shed at the rear of three-storey houses on the opposite side of the road.
Dark days were ahead. The Government’s removal of the import tariff on ribbons in 1860 under the Cobden Treaty made French ribbons affordable and fashionable, and the Coventry trade slumped disastrously. Many weavers were reduced to near starvation; public money was raised for relief, and a soup kitchen opened in St Mary’s Hall. By 1868 nearly all the Earlsdon weavers had left, and by 1871 only David Ward’s family remained. The two weavers’ houses were soon occupied by watchmakers, and the clatter of looms in Cromwell Street was forgotten.