Fancy that - a computer bag which keeps the machine powered up

Next time you meet someone who says that Britain's textile industry is dead, please direct them to Bolton. Already noted for its pioneering auxetic bandages, which remarkably grow thicker when you stretch them, the local university has now invented a cloth which produces its own power.

The flexible fibre uses two forms of electric generator, slimmed down to such an extent that it can be woven into conventional fabrics used for anything from clothing or computer/phone-carriers to the sails of yachts. Its power production comes from minute photovoltaic cells, miniatures of the kind you get in solar panels, and their counterparts, piezoelectric fibres which generate electricity from movement.

In commercial production, the material has a fascinating range of potential uses: a light in handbags to stop, or at least shorten, that interminable fumbling for wallet or keys; a computer bag which keeps the machine powered up; sails on a schooner which provide electricity as well as catching the wind.

Patents have already been granted to the team led by Professor Elias Siores at Bolton University, where auxetic materials were pioneered by another group led by Dr Kim Alderson. Both projects, and other 'smart textiles' inventions at the uni, draw on the town's wealth of local textile and engineering knowledge; the big mills of Humphrey Spender's Mass Observation 'Worktown' study in 1937-8 may mostly be closed, but the skills which manned them are part of Bolton's DNA.

Talking of DNA, that's another feature of specialist textile research which is keeping the UK sector in demand – work on weaving, or perhaps more accurately impregnating, DNA into designer label clothes to deter piracy. Last time I was at Huddersfield's Centre for Textile Excellence I met a fascinating manufacturer who was full of this, just as Prof Siores talks engagingly and enthusiastically about his group's invention.

That is still un-named incidentally, and any suggestions would be welcome. Textiles have a long history of inventive brand titles; Nylon is an amalgam of New York and London while Crimplene comes from the valley of the Crimple beck which was overlooked by ICI's old research labs in Harrogate.

I'd go for Boltonite, or Boltwine, or something else Boltonish. Just think, in 500 years' time it could be part of the global language, like the cloth originally known as serge de Nimes, which makes up over 90 percent of the world's jeans.