Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of Halifax, Threads of Labour investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy.
Drawing on images from the company’s archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm based in Bailiff Bridge that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women’s labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets.
Drawing on her personal connection to the area, an ethnographic sensibility, and new research techniques, Lisa documents ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.
Lisa Taylor is Reader in Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University.
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