LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES

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  • Today in London spycops history, 1796: ‘Popgun’ assassination plot frameup defendants acquitted

    In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, pressure for reform of the political system grew throughout Britain. The electoral system was entirely designed to reinforce the power of the dominant class, the aristocracy. Just a tiny fraction of the population had the vote, mostly wealthy, all men; traditional constituencies controlled by powerful landowners…

  • When Hanwell was run by Slaveowners

    In our last post we discussed the ongoing and intertwined links of the ownership of landed estates in England, the process of enclosure that concentrated the land in fewer hands, the massive profits some rich families made from the slave trade and owning slaves on Caribbean plantations, and the continuing networks of wealth power and…

  • Enclosure, the Slave trade, Wealth: from Cirencester Park to the Charborough Estate

    Jamaican-born Black revolutionary Robert Wedderburn, writing in ‘The Axe Laid to the Root’, his series of open agitational letters urging Caribbean slaves to revolt against their ‘owners’ in 1817, urged the slaves among who he had been born, to not only overthrow their masters, but to then keep hold of the land they worked. He…

  • Today in London art history, 2001: William Blake vs GlaxoSmithKline

    Report of a 2001 action at the Tate Britain Gallery in London, against a William Blake exhibition sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. On the final day (11 February 2001) of the William Blake exhibition at the Tate Britain Gallery in London, 30 people gathered on the steps outside to reclaim Blake from ‘the dead…