One sunny day in 2017, Kate Jackson, then 61, took a wooden wool-spinning wheel into her garden. She propped her iPad against a brick, pressed record and started talking as she spun – about crafts, the countryside, her menagerie of animals (cats, chickens, bees and Eileen the goose). Jackson enjoyed watching videos about gardening and quilting on YouTube, so one day she thought: how hard can it be? “I made a resolve to upload once a week.”
She called her channel The Last Homely House, “which is a place to feel comfortable, secure and welcomed. That’s what I wanted my channel to be.” It now has 123,000 subscribers. Last May, Jackson – who lives in rural Northumberland – set up a sister channel, called The Last Homely Garden. She has an online shop, nearly 40,000 Instagram followers, and even a fan-run Facebook group. She has become the linchpin of a thriving online community.
