Events Diary

This is where forthcoming events are listed. If you would like to receive email notification of events please ask to join the email list using the form on the contact page.

You can also see a list of Event Series and a list of all the events we have ever done listed chronologically.

Current & forthcoming Event Series:

Bristol Radical History Festival : to

One Year! Photographs From The Miners Strike 1984/5

Exhibition Presented By The Martin Parr Foundation In Bristol

Date: to , 2024
Time:
Price: Free/Various
Note: This event was not organised by BRHG.
transparent fiddle Not A BRHG Event
The Martin Parr Foundation (MPF) is presenting a valuable exhibition of photographs & ephemera to mark the 40th anniversary of the Miners Strike 1984/5: One Year! Photographs from the Miners Strike 1984/5. The exhibition will run from 18 January to 31 March 2024, at the MPF building at 316 Paintworks, Bristol BS4 3AR (check this page for map, access, transport etc) Alongside the exhibition wil be a series of events - see here for tickets - of which the following are recommended: 18 January, […]

Opening the Archives

Reference Library makes available documents for the Bristol Radical History Festival

Date: , 2024
Time: to
Location: Bristol Room
Venue: Bristol Central Reference Library, BS1 5TL
Price: Free
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
  We are thrilled to be collaborating with the Bristol Reference Library for an opening the archives event on Saturday 13th April. There will be a choice selection of books and documents on display to view and peruse, complementing the themes of the forthcoming Bristol Radical History Festival. As the public library service built up its international affairs collection during the mid-1930s, interest in the Spanish Civil War was foremost. Historic items reflecting perspectives from both […]

Radical plaque-making

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Gloria Daniel, Mark Steeds
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
Raising John Isaac TTEACH Plaques’ Gloria Daniel shares the methods and means she has employed over the past four years to confront and challenge institutions to face and acknowledge their past involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave economy. She explains how a simple but personal request to permanently site a corrective historical plaque to her enslaved great-great grandfather, John Isaac Daniel, led to the creation of TTEACH (Transatlantic Trafficked Enslaved African Corrective Historical) […]

Women Listening to Women: feminism, self injury and the Bristol Crisis Service for Women

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Rosie Wild, Sarah Chaney
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
In April 1986, a group of women drawn together by their experiences of trauma, self injury and punitive psychiatric treatment started the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. An explicitly feminist user-led and volunteer-run listening service for women suffering mental health crises, it offered callers space to talk about their pain and how they endured it. Through listening without judgment, BCSW showed women a solidarity they had rarely experienced. Amplifying their voices, it began to forcefully […]

‘No Cure, No Fee, Boarding Excepted’: ‘Mason’s Madhouses’ In Old Fishponds

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Mike Jempson
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
Journalist, Fishponds Voice History columnist and Bristol Radical History Group author Mike Jempson will reveal some of the fascinating facts his research uncovered about the private madhouse which dominated Fishponds in the eighteenth century. His talk includes some of the institution’s more startling treatments, the sensational public inquiry and the shameful end of the Mason dynasty - the family firm that ran this biggest private asylum outside of London for 120 years. Drawing on museum […]

Writing and Publishing Radical History

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Stephen E. Hunt
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
The Bristol Radical History Group has produced seventy publications, mostly within the Radical Pamphleteer series, with several more pending. These honour and continue the tradition of the troublesome chapbooks, broadsides, and seditious tracts from the earliest days of mass printing. The series was launched in 2008, with Mark Steeds’ “Cry Freedom, Cry Seven Stars,” a tribute to the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson, active in Bristol during the 18th century. Since then, a collection of […]

Resistance in Myanmar

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Bristol #WithMyanmar Group
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
The Bristol #WithMyanmar Group will briefly introduce their support and solidarity work with people in Myanmar, and also now living in Bristol and the UK. This is both in the three years since the latest military coup in February 2021, and previously, when it was possible to visit Myanmar. A Myanmar speaker will then reflect on Myanmar's history since liberation from British colonial rule in 1948 (then known as Burma), which has included over 60 years of brutal military rule, and numerous […]

Bristol and the Rojava Revolution

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
In 2012, during the early days of the Syrian Civil War, three mainly Kurdish regions in north-east Syria were able to overthrow and remove the Assad regime through revolutionary action. Over the next years these regions would work with other parts of northern Syrian society and form the Movement for a Democratic Society. Its core values are for grassroots democracy, women's liberation, and ecology. By 2014, this revolutionary movement and its armed defence forces, known as the YPG and the YPJ at […]

The Muller Orphanage Dismissal Books: saving souls and judging bodies

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Kate Brooks
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
As well as co-founding the Plymouth Brethren movement, Victorian preacher George Muller set up a world famous orphanage in Bristol funded purely - his Narratives claimed - by prayer alone. Across the world, Muller continues to inspire countless evangelical christian books, films, TV shows and even a ballet. There is a small museum to Muller in one of the old Muller Homes, on Ashley Down Hill. Muller’s role in welfare and care history is significant: Dickens was one of a number of people visiting […]

What can we learn about mental health care from Bristol’s psychiatric hospital?

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Stella Mann
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
  In 1861, Bristol’s Lunatic Asylum opened its doors and 164 pauper patients transferred from the workhouse. What treatment did this new state-of-the-art hospital provide, and how did it evolve over the next 130 years until closing in 1994? Stella Mann of the Glenside Hospital Museum, housed in the old asylum chapel, will talk about the evolution of Bristol’s mental health provision from the Victorian age to the present day. History can be discovered through many different routes. Every […]

Putting History on Television

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: David Parker, Colin Thomas
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
Producer/directors David Parker and Colin Thomas have both challenged conventional approaches to television history in their productions: David by tapping into home movie archives and by seeking out 'history from below' contributors in West Country series like Reel Lives; and Colin by including different historical perspectives within the same programme. Michael Sheen described The Dragon Has Two Tongues, a series on Welsh history which Colin made for Channel 4, as “one of the greatest history […]

The Bristol Admiral who defended the Haitian Revolution

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Paul Clammer
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
In 1804, the former Caribbean slave colony of Haiti became the first free black republic in the world, having emancipated itself by force of arms by defeating the armies of France, Britain and Spain on the battlefield. This new nation sought international allies to help safeguard its hard-worn freedom in a world of imperial slavery. In this talk, we uncover the lost story of Thomas Goodall, a Bristolian who served as Haiti's first Admiral and tangled with the Royal Navy in the fight to defend […]

The Life and Death of Hannah Wiltshire: Bedminster Union Workhouse and Victorian social attitudes to Epilepsy

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Rosemary L Caldicott
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
In 1855 rumours of murder and a cover up were circulating in the small north Somerset village of Walton-in-Gordano. An epileptic destitute country girl, Hannah Wiltshire, had died in the Bedminster Union Workhouse at Flax Bourton. The Board of Guardians were suspected of concealing the true magnitude of neglect at the workhouse, leading to accusations of medical negligence. Wiltshire’s death caused public outrage after letters were written to the local newspapers, sparking a campaign for […]

Eastville Workhouse, the mentally ill and systemic murder mysteries

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Roger Ball
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act aimed to prevent the mentally afflicted from being incarcerated in workhouses for long periods. However, studies across the country have demonstrated that large numbers of people with mental health issues were being held in these institutions, sometimes in appalling conditions, throughout the Victorian period and even into the twentieth century. Data for Eastville workhouse (constructed in 1847) in east Bristol supports this trend, despite the fact that after 1845 […]

The 1831 reform riots in the southwest – display

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Steve Poole, Roger Ball
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
In early October 1831, the defeat of the Second Reform Bill in the House of Lords led to a huge wave of pro-reform protests and disturbances across Britain and Ireland. Major disorders in the east Midlands, Dorset and Somerset were followed in Bristol by the most serious riot in nineteenth century England. This 11 panel display outlines the political context to the reform protests, both nationally and locally in the southwest, investigates the nature of the riots in Dorset, Somerset, Bristol, […]

Bristol Heroes – Volunteer Fighters in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39

Date: , 2024
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
With: Alan Lloyd
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
The Spanish Civil War was an important pre-cursor to the Second World War, pitting republicans and revolutionaries against an emerging military dictatorship in Spain and their fascist allies in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. After a fascist inspired military coup, led by General Franco in July 1936, was halted in its tracks by the armed action of the Spanish working class, the battlelines were drawn for three years of bloody conflict. Volunteers from all over the world went to Spain to […]

The London Recruits: undercover in apartheid South Africa

Date: , 2024
Time:
Venue: M Shed, BS1 4RN
Price: Free
With: Ken Keable, Bevis Miller
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
The history of the Anti-Apartheid movement brings up images of boycotts and public campaigns in the UK. But another story went on behind the scenes, in secret, one that has been never told before. This is the story of the foreign recruits and their activities in South Africa, how they acted in defiance of the Apartheid government and its police on the instructions of the African National Congress (ANC). Ken Keable made two undercover trips to Johannesburg and Durban in 1968 and 1970 to […]

Bristolians vs Blackshirts: militant anti-fascism in the 1930s

Date: , 2024
Time: to
Price: Free/donation
With: Paul Kingdon
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
During the 1930s in Bristol and nationally much of the working-class identified Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF) as a major threat their freedom, their organisations and to ethnic and religious groups within their number. This walk visits the venues that welcomed Mosley's Blackshirts and celebrates the community that vigorously rejected him along with Mussolini, Hitler and General Franco. It will introduce some of the flashpoints in the city-centre marking a proud history of […]

News From Nowhere: The Revolutionary History of Literacy

Reflections on the past present and future of autonomous working class education

Date: , 2024
Venue: The Cube, BS2 8JD
Price: Free/donation
With: John Casey
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
In the UK we have been living through the dismantling of the public education system and its privatisation, with little oversight of what is replacing it. As the state retreats further from providing these and other vital community services it is useful to reflect on what preceded the current system in order to help imagine what might be created in its aftermath – with and without the involvement of the state and capital. We will look at education as an (always) a contested social space of power […]
Section: Events
Subjects: Class
Posted: Modified:

Fighting Women: Interviews with veterans of the Spanish Civil War

Date: , 2024
Venue: The Cube, BS2 8JD
Price: Free/donation
With: Isabella Lorusso
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
Isabella Lorusso author of Fighting Women: Interviews with veterans of the Spanish Civil War will be speaking about her collection of interviews from the 1990s with women veterans of the fight against fascism in Spain in the 1930s. Fighting women is a choral book, a set of interviews conducted with Spanish women who took part in the civil war. Some took up arms and fought on the front, others joined the POUM, Free Women or different anarchist groups. They all fought against Francoism and for the […]

Revolution and What Happens After: Transgenerational Aftershocks

Date: , 2024
Price: Free/donation
With: ​Ellen McWilliams
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
Ellen McWilliams is haunted by the killings in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence and Civil War and in particular by the Dunmanway Massacre of April 1922 which marked the area where she grew up. Her Great Grandmother was active in Cumann na mBan and her granduncle fought for independence as well as in the Anti-Treaty IRA while her Grandfather was a scout and messenger for the West Cork IRA while still in his teenage years. Ellen will talk about why the events of those days remain deeply […]

Fighting for two Republics : Irish volunteers in the British Battalion, International Brigades

Date: , 2024
Venue: The Cube, BS2 8JD
Price: Free/donation
With: Joe Mooney
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
Between 1936 to 1939 Spain was engulfed in a brutal Civil War, as the Republican government struggled to defeat a fascist military coup, which was supported by Hitler and Mussolini. Workers from all over the world volunteered to fight in the International Brigades against the fascist threat. This included a significant number of Irishmen, many of whom were veterans of the IRA and were part of the Independence struggle against British rule. In this talk the story of these Irish volunteers will be […]

‘Walter Rodney: What they don’t Want you to Know’

Date: , 2024
Time: to
Venue: The Cube, BS2 8JD
Price: £5
With: Arlen Harris, Luke Daniels
Series: Bristol Radical History Festival
Colourful poster listing dates, times and themes
BRHG are very pleased to welcome Arlen Harris (co-director) and Luke Daniels to Bristol to discuss this new documentary profiling the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney. ‘Walter Rodney: What they don’t Want you to Know’ is an original 72-minute documentary featuring a murder, Cold War conspiracies, Black Power, the end of Empire, and how that connects to the policing, surveillance practices and social movements of today. This is the first film where Walter’s widow reveals the personal impact […]

Pin It on Pinterest