What's This Place?: Stories From Radical Social Centres in the UK and Ireland

 

A useful and inspiring overview (from 2008)...

Available as a PDF at Libcom.

Radical movements have always needed bases and spaces to meet, eat, grow and gather. Recently in the UK and Ireland there has been a conscious effort to link these social centres, info shops and resource centres whether squatted rented or bought, into a loose network that can share ideas and support each other.

In January 2007 a Social Centres Network gathering was held at the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford that was attended by people from all over the UK. There was an idea to try and make the wider project of autonomous spaces more visible and clear to the people who used social centres and the idea of this booklet was born. A call-out for essays, cartoons, reflections, and rants was put out and here are the resulting 27 pieces. Most of them are descriptive of particular places, others discuss more general questions about the idea of social centres. A few of us helped to proof and layout the booklet but the pieces have not been edited.

As these pieces show, there is a huge diversity of projects being built from food co-ops and volunteer run vegan cafes to migrant solidarity and mental health self-help groups. At the same time we are often tackling similar issues as we experiment with self-management, working without leaders and treading the fine line between being a radical, autonomous space and also reaching out into our local communities, providing services and dealing with authorities.

We hope that this booklet will promote debate and action on the need for autonomous spaces in our cities and neighbourhoods. So now we pass over to those involved, to let the stories speak for themselves.

There are copies available FREE in all the social centres we can find and also by emailing us at socialcentrestories [at] riseup [dot] net

Copyleft- feel free to use, copy and distribute.

From https://socialcentrestories.wordpress.com/.

A tribute to Tony Nicholls, radical documentary-maker of North London

It is sad to hear of the passing of Tony Nicholls, a radical documentary-maker. We in the Friends of Lordship Rec worked closely with him in 2007 to make a very powerful documentary on the need to get the investment to rescue the park - which had fallen into a shocking state over the previous 20 years. The Council included it in the community/Council 2008 bid to the Lottery for £4m. The Friends were told that it was one of the reasons that persuaded the Lottery to award the money. Its still worth watching as it shows the journey from then till now - go and visit the park now and spot the difference!

Dave Morris

Restore Our Rec – Friends Documentary (2008)  [15min 32secs]

Tony Nicholls obituary - Di Gowland

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My husband, Tony Nicholls, who has died aged 81, was a documentary maker, activist and video consultant. During his career, he worked on many hundreds of projects, including TV documentaries, feature films, commercials and education videos.

Tony integrated his professional production work with a commitment to teaching. While he worked in higher education, including as course leader in media at Bedford College (1995-2005), he especially enjoyed working with schools and community groups. He was also a video consultant and trainer for the UN, working in Pakistan, Ghana, Ethiopia, and with many organisations in Nigeria (1992-2000).

Born in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, Tony was the son of Betty (nee Stokes) and Clifford Nicholls, who was in the RAF. The family moved many times in England, Scotland, Kenya and Egypt before Tony was 14, finally settling in Kingsbury, north-west London, in 1958, where Tony attended Kingsbury County grammar school.

He and his friends became a force to be reckoned with, setting up the local Young Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament branch in 1960, and in 1962 joining the Young Communist League and the Communist party. The same year Tony was sent to Reading prison for three weeks for “obstructing a policeman” at Greenham Common.

In 1963, in search of models of socialist living, Tony stayed in kibbutzim in Israel. During this time he became a keen photographer, and, still a member of the Communist party, on his return to the UK Tony began working as a photographer for the Morning Star newspaper (1965-69), through which he travelled in the then closed communist countries, including Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Albania. He also covered a sports match for the paper that led to one of his photos making the cover of Private Eye, in 1969.

In 1972, Tony was accepted on to the newly founded National Film School in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, to study documentary film-making. A man ahead of his time, in one of his student films he explored hidden cameras in cities that enabled governments to follow and collect data on the inhabitants.

Following graduation, Tony worked as a camera assistant on two features, and edited a film on projects in Chad for Christian Aid. He then worked as a director and cameraman for Liberation Films, producing health education films, community arts documentaries and campaign videos for various organisations.

He went to produce six one-hour documentaries for Channel 4 on the history of trade in tea, sugar and coffee (1983-85); he made educational and promotional documentaries in Nigeria and Ethiopia and produced and directed Music and Musicians of the Commonwealth (1993), a film of a gala concert for Queen Elizabeth at Lancaster House, commissioned by the Royal Overseas League.

As well as his position at Bedford, he lectured at the North London and City polytechnics, and the American College in London.

We met in 1989 and in 1993 our son, George, was born. We married in 1998.

He is survived by me and George, and by his brothers, Phillip and Geoffrey.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/apr/13/tony-nicholls-obituary

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The 1984 Islington Nursery Strike

"The year 1984 has a hallowed place in the history of British industrial action as the year that launched the miners’ strike – but there is another strike, in its own way just as dramatic, that has been largely forgotten. On the 16th of April of that year, 155 nursery workers employed by London’s Islington Council began an indefinite strike. What was at issue was chronic understaffing, which led to an unsafe ratio of children to staff. The striking workers consisted almost entirely of young women, many of them in their very first jobs. They remained on strike for fifteen weeks until ultimately Islington Council bowed to their key demands."

The latest issue of the History Workshop podcast covers these events and includes conversation with participants. There is also a wider discussion about childcare struggles. 

There is a related project happening on this topic called Childcare Voices. I was delighted to hear on the podcast that this had been partly inspired by the notes of a previous RaHN meeting on "Activism and the under fives" back in 2014.

Online radical archives

Evan Smith has published an invaluable resource showcasing the ever-growing number of free to access online radical archives: https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/radical-online-collections-and-archives/

Locations range from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and topics include Anarchism, Black Radicalism, Feminism and many other revolutionary strands. 

Evan has also written an interesting article on this initiative (and the limitations of digital archives generally) for Society for the Study of Labour History: Don’t Mourn, Digitise! Building a list of radical online archives

Past Tense Publications

 “Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.” - Voltaire

Veteran radical publishers Past Tense have (re)printed a bunch of seditious literature that should be of interest:

Rights of Common: The Fight Against the Theft of Sydenham Common and One Tree Hill... and other open spaces in the Great North Wood. £3

Makeshift Landscapes - Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward £5

A brief examination of 'plotland' developments in early 20th century Britain - rural settlements, hosting DIY buildings, often on marginal, squatted & disputed land.

Black Women Organising: The Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent £3.

And a lot more besides - see the full range at https://pasttensehistories.bigcartel.com/

Also available at an independent / radical bookshop near you.