Bristol Anarchist Bookfair 2025

Is the rise of the far right, war, authoritarianism, ecological meltdown and the general omnicrisis getting you down? Looking for co-conspirators, some manageable ways to engage with it all, or just some hope? You need the legend that is: the full scale Bristol Anarchist Bookfair, back after a 5 year break in a big new venue. There will be an amazing range of Bristol campaigns across 50 different stalls. Come browse for the crew and the project that suits you best, or that mate you haven’t seen for a decade.

More information here.

Bristol Radical History Group are supporting two talks at this event and will be running our bookstall.

11:45am-12:45pm – Frome Room

We Must Begin With The Land: Seeking Abundance And Liberation Through Social Ecology – Steve Hunt
Food is glorious, but it is also increasingly precarious. This may not make headlines, but we all need to care. Office for National Statistics figures suggest that domestic food inflation has seen prices rise by more than a third since 2020. This is currently leading to a proliferation of food banks, unimaginable only a few years ago. Shockingly, world hunger has increased during the past decade, according to the United Nations. The reasons for this situation are complex but likely a combination of multiple ecological crises, corporate and state control of land and food-supply chains, armed conflicts, and rising demand. Yet Stephen Hunt’s new book “We Must Begin with the Land: Seeking Abundance and Liberation Through Social Ecology” is not another account of global doom. Using social ecology’s anti-colonial lens, it aims to spark conversations about how we might diversify and democratise how we grow, share and eat. Steve Hunt is a member of the Bristol Radical History Group, his talk will discuss the historic roots of “dominatory agriculture” and the flowering of political ecology from the ideas of Murray Bookchin and others in the 1960s and 1970’s counterculture to present-day alternatives.

12:45am-13:45pm – Frome Room

The Real Story of the Countering Colston Campaign – Countering Colston
On 7th June 2020, hundreds of Black Lives Matter demonstrators pulled down the 125-year-old statue of slave trader Edward Colston, who had been put in a place of prominence in Bristol City Centre; sending shockwaves around the world. Commentators at the time thought that the act had happened in a vacuum, but the truth was that many knew that the statue was inappropriate, and that the authorities had failed them for the preceding century. The first to uncover the slavers true story was the Reverend Henry Wilkins, whose 1920 biography of Edward Colston revealed his leading role in the Royal African Company. Whistleblower Wilkins then suggested 70 other Bristol men and women who should have been remembered in his stead, but he wasn’t listened to, and instead he was pilloried from the pulpit for his pains. Over 100 years on and Bristol still fails to celebrate the work of its great women and men… All the while, the chief protagonists defending Colston’s memory were the Anglican Church and Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers, an unelected body of business people (‘merchants’), who since their Royal Charter of 1552 have operated a system of patronage behind the scenes of successive Bristol administrations