Events

This is a list of all the events that we have ever done in chronological order. You can also see a list of Event Series, or a list of forthcoming events in the Event Diary.

Current & forthcoming Event Series:

Miscellaneous 2024 : to
Miscellaneous 2023 : to
Bristol Radical History Festival : to

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

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 […]

Writing and Publishing Radical History

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 […]

Bristol and the Zapatistas

Just over thirty years ago the world woke up to the news that in Chiapas, South East Mexico a revolution had occurred. The Zapatistas rose up in January 1994 against 500 years of injustice and oppression of indigenous peoples, against neo-liberal economics and specifically the Mexican government’s recent signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) entered the largest city in the state, San Cristobal, and briefly took another six […]

Eastville Workhouse, the mentally ill and systemic murder mysteries

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 real story of the Countering Colston campaign

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 […]

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

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 […]

The Bristol Admiral who defended the Haitian Revolution

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 […]

Putting History on Television

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 1831 reform riots in the southwest – display

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, […]

Voices of the Bristol Crisis Service for Women

This multimedia display allows visitors to hear the voices of current and former staff and volunteers of groundbreaking feminist mental health service, the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. Now known as Self Injury Support, this pioneering group was started in the back of a charity shop in Easton as a feminist collective in 1986. Its goals were to listen to, support, and amplify the voices of women using self injury to cope with their experience of trauma. In 2022, as part of an oral history […]

Pin It on Pinterest