Steve Philbey

By Roger
Many years ago, stuck in a traffic jam on the Bath Road bridge, I looked up to see a series of massive slogans expertly pasted onto the advertising hoardings on the billboards. The first on an insurance company advert said: WHO IS SPARTACUS? The second said: ARE YOU SPARTACUS? The third over a group of 'Kwik Fit Fitters' said: WE ARE SPARTACUS And finally the last in the row... YOU ARE SPARTACUS This was one of my first introductions to the work of the Saint Just Mob, artists and subvertisers […]

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 […]