My First Car: Academic Dr Lisa Taylor recalls her first car - a Ford Escort
Academic Dr Lisa Taylor recalls her first car, a Ford Escort, with fondness.
She said she struggled to pass her test. “The Escort was second hand and I remember it had a nodding dog in the back window.”
Dr Taylor, a Leeds Beckett academic, said she was quite late to driving after taking five attempts to pass her test. But she says she developed into a good driver.
“I was about 27 when I got it, I think,” she said. “I really like driving now. I’m quite a confident driver and I will drive anywhere.”
Dr Taylor now has a Mazda CX-3 which she likes and she often drives to concerts by the Commoners’ Choir of which she is a member. It is a “strange yet open and inclusive choir” which meets in Leeds.
Dr Taylor, who now lives in Leeds, recently launched a book called Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community.
It is based on the community where she was raised, Bailiff Bridge, a former carpet town.
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.
It showcases a cache of images from the company's archives and donated personal photographs and mines the history of a firm that carpeted interiors at home and across the world from the mid-1800s, charting the company's fortunes as the dour 1930s gave way to the affluence of the 1950s. It has been described as a 'great piece of scholarship that reads like a novel' and it reveals how creative arts can spark conversations about lost labour, industrial decline and the power of collective memory. She is a reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her book is published by Manchester University Press.