Manufacture des Flandres Roubaix, Textile heritage museum in Roubaix, France

The Manufacture des Flandres is a textile museum housed in a former factory in Roubaix, showcasing both craft and industrial cloth production methods. The building contains a collection of spinning, weaving, and dyeing machines that illustrate the shift from manual techniques to modern manufacturing processes.

The Craye et fils weaving firm, founded in 1914 by Israël Jean-Baptiste Craye, occupied these premises and made upholstery fabrics, velvets, carpets and jacquard cloth before turning in the 1960s to mechanically woven medieval Flemish tapestries. The Belgian group Metrax took over the family business in 1992, and its director opened a jacquard museum here in 2001, La Manufacture des Flandres. Production moved to Belgium in 2009; the city bought the building and the collections, and the renovated museum reopened in 2015.

The museum's name, La Manufacture, refers to the workshop created in 2001 as the Manufacture des Flandres. It displays medieval Flemish tapestries woven mechanically from the 1960s, and hosts temporary exhibitions on contemporary textile creation, often with ENSAIT or the Musée de La Piscine.

The museum occupies part of the former Craye et fils weaving works, with the machine room as its centrepiece; most looms still run and are started up during guided tours. Archive videos from INA and recorded worker testimonies can be listened to at the start or end of the visit. Temporary exhibitions and textile workshops run through the year, some organised with ENSAIT or the Musée de La Piscine.

Some machines in the museum are still operational and can be set in motion during your visit, letting you hear the sounds and see the movements in action. This transforms the abstract idea of textile production into something tangible and shows how loud and complex factory work actually was.