Celebrating The Nomads Tent - by Dorothy Armstrong
Book your free space at Dorothy's talk and book signing here.
As Andrew moves into the next phase for The Nomads Tent, I am one of the many people who want to share what the Tent has meant to them - so much more than a shop, but also a wonderful shop!
In the summer of 2003, I was spending Friday to Monday every week in Edinburgh, leaving my three young children at home with my mother in Kent. I was part of the Royal Bank of Scotland team absorbing the huge National Westminster Bank into what was at the time ‘a wee jock outfit’, after a hostile takeover of the giant by the minnow. RBS has suffered many vicissitudes in the twenty-two years since then, but there was heroism in that first step on its road to global domination then collapse.
Every weekend that summer, after Friday closing, we ran the two institutions as a single bank, to see what didn’t work. On Monday morning both banks had to be up and running again as two independent entities, which was always a heart-stopping moment. We spent the week fixing everything that had gone wrong then tried the experiment again.
I was on the night shift, arriving at mission control in Fettes Row at 7 pm and leaving at 8am the next morning. Anyone who works nights is lucky to get five hours daytime sleep, so by two o’clock in the afternoon, I was wide awake, missing my children and having a dark night of the soul. In my hotel was a copy of the magazine Interiors, with an ad for The Nomads Tent. I decided to make a sad and exhausted afternoon excursion.
The magic began when I walked up St Leonard’s Lane, with its secret gate into Holyrood Park, and Salisbury Crags looming above. The Tent itself was, as now, many things… a bazaar, an exhibition space, a congenial place for meeting like-minded people, with Rufus, then Andrew, as the presiding genial spirit. On that first visit, I felt spiritually as well as aesthetically fed. Here was the whole beautiful world beyond the nighttime dark and angst of Fettes Row and the banks. I couldn’t take a carpet back with me on the plane to Gatwick, so I bought a twenty-five foot long ikat, with huge black motifs on a pale pink background, which I still treasure.
But The Tent had lit a bigger fire. A few years later, I left banking and business, and went back to school, first to the School of Oriental and African Studies, then to the V&A, to educate myself in Asian textiles. The fact that I am now a poor textile historian rather than a rich banker is down to the Nomad’s Tent, and I bless it for that.
