Miners strike benefits 1984: Deptford, Woolwich, Old Kent Road with Test Dept, The Mekons and more

There were many fundraising gigs in support of the miners during their 1984/85 strike, including across SE London. One of the most musically significant took place at the Albany in Deptford in September 1984 where Test Dept played with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir - starting a strong relationship between the two that led to the album 'Shoulder to Shoulder'. I've written about that here before, but there's some additional detail in an interview with Test Dept's Graham Cunnington at Electronic Sound. According to Gra:

“Pat Brown, who was in the Deptford Labour Party at the time, was putting on this benefit at the Albany arts centre, but all the bands he’d earmarked to play had pulled out. Jack Balchin, who was our sound guy and who worked in Deptford and Lewisham teaching music to young kids, said we should do it. He went up to Pat and said, ‘I’ve got the band for you’. Pat had never heard of us, but he said OK, and because we were used to putting on our own shows, we said we’d organise the whole thing. We also said we should have some direct involvement with the mining community, not just do a benefit and send the money out'.  I didn't realise that the Choir was originally pulled together for this gig, rehearsing their songs on the bus on the way to London.

Poster for the Albany gig by Brett Turnbull
(sourced from Test Dept facebook group where there are some pics from the gig)

The Ambulance Station squat on the Old Kent Road also hosted gigs. This 'Solidarity with the Miners' punk benefit in August 1984 featured Your Heterosexual Violence, The Unknown Colours, Violet Circuit and State Hate (I saw the latter play there on another occasion). The Ambulance Station building (which seems to have actually been a former fire station) still stands opposite the Tesco supermarket on Old Kent Road.

In November 1984 The Mekons played a miners benefit at Thames Poly cellar bar in Woolwich with 5 Go Down to the Sea, the Eels,  A Popular History of Signs and the Violet Circuit (again)

See previous posts:

Test Dept and the Miners Strike

Lewisham Miners Support Group/Women Against Pit Closures

Supporting the Miners at Goldsmiths

A mix of music from the miners strike I did a while ago:

 

Bermondsey Folk Festival 2025

Bermondsey Folk Festival is back on Saturday, 27 September 2025 in the Blue market (SE16 3UQ) from 12 noon to 5 pm, in an event that will feature Jacken Elswyth (amazing banjo player with Shovel Dance Collective), Cunning Folk (launching new album Folk Process 2), Bity Booker, Indika Akuus, Gemma Khawaja, Okinawa Sanshinkai and others.

The festival has been going in one from or other since 2015. I remember seeing the great Andy Irvine (Sweeney's Men, Planxty etc.) playing at the 2019 iteration at the Biscuit Factory.  Incidentally Andy is back at the Ivy House SE15 in November at the Goose is Out folk club).

Andy Irvine at 2019 Bermondsey Folk Festival

Cenotaph South - South London's poetic landscape

'Cenotaph South: mapping the lost poets of Nunhead Cemetery' (Penned in the Margins, 2016) by Chris McCabe is a remarkable book. Partly it is what it says on the cover – an exploration of some of the largely forgotten poets buried there including Marian Richardson and Albert Craig. But he also wanders over the wider South London poetic landscape, extending from Robert Browning's cottage on Telegraph Hill, through the cemetery and onto William Blake's Peckham Rye and then to Dulwich woods and village where the Crown and Greyhound pub ('the Dog') hosted poetry gatherings upstairs from 1940s to 1980s. He also mentions contemporary Peckham poets like Caleb Femi, performing at the Review Bookshop in Bellenden Road.

He goes in search of a hawthorn tree suitable for Blake's vision of angels on Peckham Rye and find the most appropriate candidate is to be a tree on the Rye Hill estate:

'Quaint English Bauhaus. There is a map of Peck Hill and Rye Hill Park Estate laid out in the colours of a Butlins map: south London joyland. I check the Rocque map, completed almost to the date that Blake was here: this would have been open fields, the edge of an enclosure separating the Rye from what was most likely private fields. I weave through the outskirts of the estate. The land around Frome House is lined with what look to be ancient trees, bark knotted in folds. The trees grow within yards of the windows of the flats, past the patched light that breaks through the skeleton of a scaffold. The trees are trying to grow inwards, towards the sun. There is what looks like a hawthorn here - gnarled and ancient-looking, awesome in scale, towering over the flats. This is a hawthorn to take on the oaks. A hawthorn worthy of any angel'.

We don't have to take literally that this is the tree - the details of Blake's childhood visions are sketchy to say the least - but I like the idea that it might be found not in the park itself but in nearby council estate. 

In 'mapping out the woods, pubs, colleges and houses of South East London's dead poets' he finds the area to be 'the richest landscape of poetic activity in London'. Is it something about the hills, home to the muses in classical times according to Robert Graves so why not here too? 

'The word muse, we are told, comes from the root mont, meaning mountain. I think of the high points around Nunhead cemetery, Telegraph Hill (where Robert Browning lived) and the higher neighbouring peaks of Sydenham Hill and Forest Hill. There is a pull to poets in these high points, an irresistible urge for the heights: light, perspective, space'.

Pagemasters Zine Fair 2025

Coming up next weekend (6/7 September 2025), the Pagemasters Zine Fair at ArtHub Studios, Stanley Street SE8 4BL (near New Cross station). More than 40 publishers stalls plus lots more. Look out for some local history from Past Tense and South London Landscape History. More details here

Update after the event:

Good to see the Pagemasters zine fair in Deptford so busy last weekend, lots of stalls and interesting publications. A tribute there too to the recently departed Mark Pawson, inveterate zinester, badge maker, mail artist and more.