Pilning and Severn Beach History Group

Active local history group with website and Facebook. Pilning and Severn Beach, villages beside the Bristol Channel to the west of the city. Founded in 1999, the history group has since produced publications and newsletters on local history, and has assembled a a collection of archival documents and photographs relating to the local area. The Group's heritage trail is well worth checking out if you live in or are visting these villages. See website for further information and membership details.

The 1970s Counterculture in the West Country

The story of the Bath Arts Workshop

From the late 1960s through the 1970s the counterculture helped to make the West Country fizz with creative ideas and events. One of the most successful ventures, locally and nationally, was the Bath Arts Workshop. As a spin-off from London’s influential Arts Lab, BAT was a loose collective of artists and community activists. To describe it as a community arts group, however, would be to under-explain its work. It was that and much more as it proliferated into festival organisation, media […]

It Felt Like Year One: A Tour of Angela Carter’s 1960s Bristol

Stephen E. Hunt of Bristol Radical History Group will be presenting an online tour, based on the Bristol Radical History Group publication Angela Carter's Provincial Bohemia': The Counterculture in 1960s and 1970s Bristol and Bath. This event is part of Being Human 2020, the national festival of the humanities. Angela Carter was one of the late 20th century’s most acclaimed novelists and came of age as a writer in 1960s Clifton, where she experienced life in post-war Bristol, looking at a […]

(Repeat) Talk on Regional Radical Press in Britain 1968-88 exhibition

Repeat of talk first given at 12 noon

Prof. Steve Poole (UWE Bristol) will give an overview of the Recovering the Regional Radical Press in Britain 1968-88 project, highlighting the publications in the exhibition on Level 2. "From the late sixties to the mid-eighties, small, co-operatively produced local and neighbourhood papers played an important role in grassroots radical politics across the British Isles. Some achieved passing prominence with occasional news scoops, but most are unremembered now and their history is overlooked. […]

Talk on Regional Radical Press in Britain 1968-88 exhibition

This talk will be repeated at 2pm

Prof. Steve Poole (UWE Bristol) will give an overview of the Recovering the Regional Radical Press in Britain 1968-88 project, highlighting the publications in the exhibition on Level 2. "From the late sixties to the mid-eighties, small, co-operatively produced local and neighbourhood papers played an important role in grassroots radical politics across the British Isles. Some achieved passing prominence with occasional news scoops, but most are unremembered now and their history is overlooked. […]

Regional Radical Press in Britain 1968-88 exhibition

From the late sixties to the mid-eighties, small, co-operatively produced local and neighbourhood papers played an important role in grassroots radical politics across the British Isles. Some achieved passing prominence with occasional news scoops, but most are unremembered now and their history is overlooked. This project, led by Phil Chamberlain (University of Bath) and Steve Poole (UWE) seeks out those papers, reconnects with the people who produced them, and re-evaluates their impact on […]

Behind the Myth of Peter the Painter

Separating the fact and fiction of anarchist violence

Bristol Radical History Group is excited to host the UK book launch of "A Towering Flame: The Life and Times of the Elusive Latvian Anarchist Peter the Painter" (published by Breviary Stuff Publications). The author, anarchist historian Philip Ruff, will present and talk about his book. There will then be a Q&A and discussion. BRHG last hosted Philip Ruff when he gave a talk on 'Political Assassins' during Off With Their Heads - Bristol Radical History Week 2008. At that point he had been […]

Wales

Epic Views of a Small Country

By Jan Morris
Clevedon-born author and historian Jan Morris describes herself as ‘by loyalty Welsh’, and writes about her subject with warmth and eloquence. As a book that captures the spirit of place, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, cannot be bettered. Morris gives a brusque sense of intimacy so that you feel you’ve been grabbed by the arm and are being led across the bridges and down the valleys of Wales in your wellies, while she confides everything that she is passionate about. Far from being a dry […]

Penn, Tillett, Batons And Bread

By Randell Brantley
We are pleased to announce the publication of three new pamphlets. The Life & Family Of William Penn: 260 Years Of Bloody Colonialism, by Jim McNeill Bread Or Battons? Unemployed Workers' Struggles In 1930s Bristol, Dave Backwith and Roger Ball Ben Tillett, by Jim McNeill Details of these pamphlets can be found on the Publications Page