Stephen Kingston and the Salford Star

Uncovering the darker side of regeneration and social housing, the Salford Star has been rocking the boat in Salford since 2006. The only independent, radical and community-orientated news source in Salford, it’s “produced by Salfordians for Salfordians with attitude and love.” It won the 2008 Plain English Campaign and was runner up for the Paul [...]

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Okasional Cafes

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, anarchists and environmental activists in Manchester organised a series of squatted cafe-social centres around the city, under the name Okasional Cafe. This article is based on interviews with two people – both of whom wished to remain anonymous – who were involved in organising several of the cafes [...]

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Manchester and the Death of Terence MacSwiney

The hunger strike and death of the Lord Mayor of Cork,Terence MacSwiney, in 1920 had a profound affect on Irish people, not just in Ireland but in many cities in Britain, including Manchester. Terence MacSwiney was arrested on 12th August 1920 and sentenced at a British army court-martial to two years in prison. He joined [...]

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The March 1920 Stockport By-Election

In March 1920 Irish Republicans used a by-election in Stockport to highlight the plight of Republican prisoners on hunger-strike in a British prison. In March 1920 William O’Brien, secretary of the Irish Labour Party and a leading member of the Irish trade union movement, was arrested and taken to Wormwood Scrubs where seventy other Republican [...]

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Ernest Jones and the 1846 Chartist gathering on Blackstone Edge

Many places in Britain have been commemorated in verse – think of Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth), or Wenlock Edge (Housman), or Adlestrop railway station (Edward Thomas), or Little Gidding (TS Eliot). Blackstone Edge can join this list, thanks to the nineteenth century political leader and poet Ernest Jones. His verse The Blackstone Edge Gathering, written more [...]

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Derek Antrobus and the Vegetarian Movement in Salford

Ask people what they know about vegetarianism and probably the first thing they’ll tell you is that it was invented by middle-class hippies in the 1960s. What many people don’t realise is that the modern vegetarian movement in Britain all started in a tiny church in the working-class, gritty, industrial town of Salford. Arwa Aburawa [...]

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Ruth & Eddie Frow and the Working Class Movement Library

The Working Class Movement Library is a national collection of the history of labour movement in Britain, founded in the mid-1950s by Ruth and Edmund Frow, whose personal and political partnership lasted for over 40 years and led to the creation of this unique and wonderful archive. Eddie Frow was born in Lincolnshire in 1906, [...]

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