Spanners With Manners, London’s first all-female garage, aims to create a welcoming environment for women for whom the male-dominated traditional garage environment can feel intimidating. Laura Kennedy, who runs it with her wife Siobhan, has never had to advertise for staff. “The colleges find out about us online and they’ll phone us and say: ‘We’ve got a girl here. Can you give her a shot?” The fact that there are so female trainee mechanics shows how things have changed since Kennedy trained as a mechanic with Porsche 15 years ago. Expansion plans are afoot, she says. “We’re going to be opening an MOT center, and hopefully in about a year, we’ll start working with electric cars.”
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