The Working Class Movement Library’s new series of Invisible Histories free talks starts up again on Wednesday 9 February at the later than usual time of 3pm, when Kirstie Blair and Iona Craig from the Piston, Pen & Press project will give a free online only talk on the topic ‘Industrial workers and reading spaces in Manchester, Salford and the North’. This first talk in … Continue reading WCML free talks programme kicks off for Spring 2022
Believed to have been taken in 1855, the year in which the Manchester Mechanics Institute moved to these smart new premises on Princes Street (then known as David Street), the photograph shown here is now held in the University of Manchester Library and is part of the John Rylands online images collection. Continue reading Manchester Mechanics Institute: birthplace of the TUC
Titled ‘The new social order: work for all, art for all’, this powerful image was created by the socialist artist Walter Crane (1845-1915) for a leaflet for the so-called Ancoats Brotherhood – named for the district of Manchester in which they were based. The brotherhood had been founded in 1878 with the aim of bringing art and literature to the working class; it organised lectures, … Continue reading Walter Crane’s artistic vision of a new social order
This Sunday, 1 August, at 7pm, listeners to Radio 3 will be able to hear the noted Manchester actress Maxine Peake read The Masque of Anarchy in a performance that makes the poem resonate for a contemporary audience. Continue reading Maxine Peake and Jennifer Reid bring the culture shaped by Peterloo to life
Dr Mike Sanders introduces the work of two Ashton-under-Lyne radical poets, and Jennifer Reid performs their work as ballads. Continue reading Ashton-under-Lyne’s radical poets brought to life by Mike Sanders and Jennifer Reid
Working in partnership with the School of Social Sciences’ sociology department, The University of Manchester Library has digitised a unique collection of documents reflecting the events, and aftermath, of the Peterloo Massacre. This set of material provides a range of perspectives on that day’s tragic events and its legacy. It includes a full run of the radical newspaper, the Manchester Observer (1818-1822), whose editor, James Wroe, was … Continue reading Peterloo: digitised sources available
The great E.P. Thompson wrote in his magisterial The Making of the English Working Class that ‘1819 was a rehearsal for 1832’. Thompson drew a direct line from the Peterloo Massacre to the Great Reform Act. Indeed, the crowd of 60,000 that gathered in an open space near St. Peter’s Church in central Manchester on August 16, 1819, came to hear reform-minded speakers. Famously, the … Continue reading David Strittmatter (Buffalo) on the erasure of St Peter’s Field as a site of commemoration
Society for the Study of Labour History 