In this guest post, Bernadette Hyland reviews Michael Herbert’s biography on Manchester’s black middleweight boxing champion and communist, Len Johnson. When my parents moved to Clayton, a working class suburb of Manchester in 1963, it was a large sprawling council estate surrounded by engineering and manufacturing factories and dominated by two busy main roads, Ashton […]
William Cuffay, black pioneer of the Chartist movement
Working class radicals from our past are very rarely remembered within our public sphere – there are few monuments to their feats and their personal collections feature little within the official archives. William Cuffay was one of these working class radicals, preserving no diary, autobiography or papers and his lack of wealth and power leaving only faint traces of his life to explore
Learning from housing histories: why we need to requisition property to address the pandemic
The UK Government’s commitment to upholding individualised private property during the global Coronavirus pandemic is matched only by their wilful ignorance of historical responses to crises. By Samuel Burgum of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield At the time of writing, they are ignoring modest calls by organisations such as Streets Kitchen to buy up hotel […]
Review – Resist: Stories of Uprising
‘In the age of fake news and post-truth politics, Resist: Stories of Uprising chooses to fight fiction with (well researched, historically accurate) fiction.’ – Ra Page Days after publication, Manchester Literature Festival hosted the launch of Resist: Stories of Uprising. Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, Protest: Stories of Resistance, Comma Press’s latest anthology of short stories pairs writers with […]