This photo of a finishing room in a Nottingham factory gives an idea of the scale of production and the number of workers employed in the city's industry (25,000 at its peak in the 1890s). The complex patterns were woven on Leavers lace machines invented by the local John Levers in 1813, but the advent of cheaper lace in the mid-C19 onwards made on Raschel machines and the shift to production in China and elsewhere, meant that the demand for superior quality Nottingham lace declined dramatically during the C20.