Nicola Kathrens has never exactly taken the conventional route.
From a career in professional theatre to one-off rare knitwear, bankruptcy, a six-week journey through India and a fresh creative chapter in Coombe Street – for almost three decades, she has been making, adapting and creating here in Lyme Regis.
For the past 17 years, she has done it from the window of her Coombe Street studio, and now Kathrens Knitwear is changing again.
Beautiful gold lettering now adorns the windows of the studio, announcing the brand-new venture of ‘Gallery Kathrens Knitwear’, as the working studio is expanded to include her paintings, mosaics and distinctive handmade ceramics alongside the bespoke knitwear pieces for which she has become known.
The community in Lyme Regis fondly know this creative genius as Nicca, and to truly understand where the gallery is going, you must venture back considerably further than Coombe Street.
Born in Manchester and raised in Weymouth, Nicca admits she didn’t particularly shine at school.
She was sent to St Augustine’s Catholic Primary School along with her two sisters, and it wasn’t until she had been forcefully persuaded to appear in a school production of ‘Toad of Toad Hall’, that her school years started changing shape.
The very reluctant actress ended up receiving a reward of recognition in front of the entire school for her performance, and that feeling of knowing she had done something that stood out eventually encouraged her to audition for drama school.
Nicca trained at the Horniman Theatre School in Manchester before heading to London and beginning a professional theatre career that would last around 15 years.
Reflecting on one of the busiest seasons of her life, she said: “I never stopped working. You could be performing in a show in the evening, auditioning in the morning and already plotting another play at the very same time.”
Eventually, however, family brought her back to Dorset when her nieces and nephews were growing up and Nicca decided the call to being an aunt mattered more than remaining in London.
After years of performing, she had absolutely no idea what came next, but discovering it became the fun part.
Back in Dorset and pondering the next move, she headed to a jumble sale armed with just £20 and purchased a set of old jumpers, transformed them and took the finished pieces to Hannah Lovegrove at her gift shop in Broad Street.
Nicca recalled: “I went away thinking, ‘I don’t think they’ll sell at £18’. But she rang me a week later and said she had sold out of all of them! So, I had £100 in my back pocket, and it just went from strength to strength from there.”
Kathrens Knitwear had begun.
The journey since those early days has not been straightforward. As the business grew, Nicca moved into wholesale, which meant investing increasingly large amounts of her own money in her stock.
And slowly, over time, customers stopped paying and eventually the business collapsed, with Nicca going bankrupt.
She said: “I lost everything. And I completely lost my way for about two years.”
Struggling with the collapse of something she had poured her heart and soul into, she stepped away from fashion and decided she needed to get away and ‘think’, and her thinking took her all the way to India.
On her return to Lyme, once again, Hannah Lovegrove played a part when Nicca asked if she knew anywhere with a window where she could work from. Hannah had recently taken on the premises in Coombe Street and offered Nicca the space.
And 17 years later, Nicca is still there.
Since arriving in Lyme Regis, Nicca has made it her mission to become part of the community here.
From the early days of creating three giant pirate costumes to participate in the carnival procession to rowing in the Lyme Regis Gig Club, Nicca speaks fondly of how many opportunities there are for residents of Lyme to get involved in and meet new people.
In the earlier days of Kathrens Knitwear, both Nicca and her sister Mandy were heavily involved in mentoring textiles students from Woodroffe School, offering work experience placements to young artists and teaching them not only how to make something creative, but how to price their work for sale.
Students’ pieces were displayed in the shop window, with half of the profits going to the student and half going to a charity of their choice.
Nicca thought her acting days were behind her, until she was approached by former Marine Theatre director, Clemmie Reynolds, and asked to perform in the community production of ‘The Tempest of Lyme’, written by Andrew Rattenbury and performed in 2016, which won a National Outstanding Achievement Award and brought together a cast and crew of over 60 local residents to celebrate the town’s seafaring history.
More recently, Nicca directed the community play ‘A Midsummer Lyme’s Dream’, which won the ‘Best Walking Party’ at the Lyme Regis Carnival in 2024.
Now, as the new chapter of Gallery Kathrens Knitwear commences, what Nicca makes is no longer limited to clothing. The catalyst for expansion was a family exhibition held in Lyme Regis at the Malthouse Gallery last year.
Nicca comes from an extremely creative family, who organised the exhibition to bring generations of their work together, including that of her mother, who is now 98 and living with dementia.
It became both a celebration of the family and a tribute to the woman Nicca credits with creating its independent spirit.
“She always made something happen with seemingly nothing,” she said. “She never preached and we learnt by example.”
Preparing work for the exhibition pushed Nicca to explore other forms of creating and making. She expanded into mosaic art and, more recently, painting using recycled and otherwise discarded materials. Some of her paintings are on old breadboards rescued from the former Italian restaurant next door (now Paperbird) and others use unwanted pieces of floorboards.
And for anybody who has walked past her Coombe Street studio, you may have seen her wonderfully eccentric female ceramic angels, all of which are named ‘Cupcake’. They have developed personalities of their own, several have already sold and selected pieces are now being cast in bronze.
This autumn, those different strands of Nicca’s creativity will finally come together as Kathrens Rare Knitwear becomes Gallery Kathrens Knitwear, with paintings displayed along one wall, pottery given its own space and the knitwear remaining at the heart of the working studio.
Occasional pieces by other members of Nicca’s family will also appear, but she is adamant this isn’t becoming a conventional gallery. Instead, she sees it almost as a continuation of the career she left behind decades ago.
“In a way, it’s like my one-woman show,” she said.
After 17 years in Coombe Street, and almost 30 years since those first jumble-sale jumpers, Nicca has no intention of disappearing.
As Nicca puts it, after almost three decades: “I’ve been rehearsing this gig for 29 years: I’m really good at it now.”