There's a brand new pamphlet from Past tense Publications, purveyors of radical history to South East London and beyond:
'RARE DOINGS AT CAMBERWELL: a short tour through Camberwel'ss radical and subversive history. A wild ramble through SE5's murky past, including a dubious cast - rowdy fairgoers, proletarian artists, rioting chartists, squatters, General strikers, feminist authors, mad fol, anti-fascists and the occasional transsexual trotskyist housing officer. Visit Camberwell Fair, banned by the local bourgeoisie in 1855; local asylums Camberwell and Peckham Houses; the Havil Street Workhouse; squatted centres at Dickie Dirts, the Labour Club and Warham Street. Upturned local stones, firsthand accounts and painstaking research: from the General Strike to Reclaim Bedlam; from the Camberwell Secular Society to the struggle against the BNP in the Elmington Estate. 'Rare Doings at Camberwell' is available from past tense for just £1.50 for 66 teeming pages, plus 50p postage and packing... Drop us a line with a cheque for £2 (payable to A. Hodson) to Past Tense, c/o 56a info Shop, 56 Crampton Street, London SE17 3AE'
past tense have done some really good stuff in the past, the one about events in southark & camberwell during the 1926 general strike, one about anti enclosure riots and defending the commons in south london
ReplyDeleteone of the best ones imo was 'last orders for the local' - about pubs and the entertainment industry and still very very relevant today - makes a really strong point about how new pubs and other entertainment places create a false history of a locality which gets superimposed over the real autonomous history of a place, the accumulated lived experiences that locates & situates us is replaced by instant mass produced history, and how public environments no longer reflect the the people who use the space, who they were and what they used the space for, but instead the environment only tells you who is supposed to use the space and so the environment asserts its authority over people
https://www.alphabetthreat.co.uk/pasttense/lastorders.html