How was the deindustrialisation of Britain’s economy experienced by industrial working-class communities? What political, social, and personal afterlives do large-scale economic shifts have? And how does gender alter the lived experience of these dynamics?

In her important new book, Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community, Lisa Taylor returns to the community in which she was raised, Bailiff Bridge, a former carpet town in West Yorkshire, to explore how deindustrialisation was lived by its residents. Drawing on an ambitious collaborative arts-based project with former mill workers and more recent newcomers, the book stages a positive intervention in the village’s emotional landscape while also creating room for feelings of nostalgia, loss, and anger.

Skilfully exploring industrial loss from the perspective of those who felt it most keenly, Threads of Labour argues that nostalgia for the industrial past resides not just in the emotions but the bodies of former workers. But for Taylor, nostalgia does not mean uncritical stuckness in the past; rather, it’s a political emotion that speaks less to an idealised past than to the inadequacies of the present and that calls for efforts at communal re-making.

Lisa Taylor is Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett University. In 2021 she was awarded an ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship which enabled her to work collaboratively with a former textiles community and the artist Catherine Bertola to create the ‘Landscapes of Loss: Revaluing Labour, Remaking Community’ project.

Lisa will be joined by Mike Makin-Waite, a former ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow and author of On Burnley Road (2021); and Tim Strangleman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, and author of Voices of Guinness: An Oral History of the Park Royal Brewery (2019).

A Q&A will follow, moderated by Lars Cornelissen, ISRF Academic Editor.