TOWN FESTIVAL: Lisa Taylor, Threads of Labour

Threads of Labour charts the story of how a cleaved ex-industrial community in Halifax used arts to come together in the wake of deindustrialisation. 

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. Threads of Labour (2025) is published by Manchester University Press.