Designing highly stressed offshore renewable energy composite structures (e.g. wind and tidal turbine blades) necessitates characterisation of woven fabric composite under off axial loading. In this work a combined method of finite element analysis, digital image correlation and microscopy is used to assess the effect of ply orientation on the tensile/shear properties and failure modes of woven glass fibre reinforced polymer composites. Full field strain maps obtained by the digital image correlation method were used to evaluate the damage development and the inhomogeneity of strain localisation. The development of finite element models of mechanical test specimens is based on the analysis of micro-mechanical models of representative volume elements using a homogenisation technique in order to calculate the effective orthotropic properties. The agreement between numerically and experimentally calculated strains obtained in the elastic regimes indicates that stress analysis conducted by numerical methods is useful when characterising the effect of ply orientation on mechanical behaviour. Strain measurement conducted by the digital image correlation method indicated that there is a strong relationship between the strain distribution and the microstructure/ply orientation. In addition, it was found that the levels of localised tensile strain are higher than the global strain indicating the structural heterogeneity of the composite material. Finally, microstructural analysis of tension and shear test specimens showed that the main failure modes are de-bonded fibres, fibre pull out, in-plane/inter-laminar shear cracks and delamination.