Threads of Labour

Lisa Taylor

• 01 juli 2025
• 9781526166418

Samenvatting:

Threads of labour examines the effects of ruination and loss of community in an ex-industrial village. Charting a collaborative project of hope using carpet-making skills and industrial heritage, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a strategy of re-making.

‘Bringing together former mill workers and new residents now living on the former mill site, Threads of labour bridges the social distance by inviting participants into each other’s lives. The regenerative possibilities of sharing stories are clear to see in this beautifully woven tapestry of histories.'
Steven High, Professor, Concordia University, author of Deindustrializing Montreal

'This wonderfully written account of the loss of a carpet factory skilfully weaves together the personal, local, regional and national story of the consequences of deindustrialisation.’
Tim Strangleman, Emeritus Professor, University of Kent, author of Voices of Guinness

‘By listening to former workers in this once-thriving carpet industry, Taylor manages to make their feelings of loss and dispossession a tool for understanding the industrial past and the changing relationship of people to the places they inhabit. A great piece of scholarship that reads like a novel.'
Gilda Zazzara, Associate Professor, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

When the mills of Firths Carpets Limited closed, the social fabric of a once-thriving industrial village unravelled. Charting a collaborative arts-based project that revived carpet-making skills and textile heritage in the region, Threads of labour explores how deindustrialised communities can rebuild through acts of social re-making where government initiatives have fallen short.

Drawing on a wonderful cache of images from the company’s archives, the book mines the history of a firm that carpeted interiors at home and across the globe from the mid-1800s, charting the company’s fortunes as the dour 1930s gave way to the affluence of the 1950s. In ethnographic interviews, former workers now navigating a transformed landscape express nostalgia for the dignity of work and a lost sense of belonging.

Deeply personal and richly researched, this book reveals how creative arts can spark conversations about lost labour, industrial decline, and the power of collective memory—offering radical hope for fractured communities.

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book 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 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 the author’s personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.