Counterculture Archives - Bristol Radical History Group

We must begin with the land

Seeking abundance and liberation through social ecology

Food is glorious. 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 […]

We must begin with the land

How the social ecology of the 1970s counterculture helps us to think about food production

The Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) was a significant flowering of political ecology from the 1960s and 1970’s counterculture. It was co-founded in 1974 by its most prominent thinker, Murray Bookchin, and Dan Chodorkoff. Bookchin wrote extensively about food and agriculture from the early 1950s. In 1962, his first book on pesticides appeared, shortly before Rachel Carson’s more famous Silent Spring on the same topic. As an autoworker brought up in The Bronx district of New York, he was an […]

The Counterculture and the LGBT Press – Bristol and Beyond

Reviewing the relationship between the Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and the LGBT movement, this talk concentrates on the origins of LGBT periodicals as part of the alternative press of the period. It will cover such topics as the underground culture of gay men when male homosexuality was illegal, the repercussions of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1967 and the campaign of legal discrimination to which both the early LGBT press and the alternative press were subjected in […]

Curating Angela Carter: Bristol, Art and Writing

Bristol Radical History Festival 2023 poster, featuring a Walter Crane print

Angela Carter is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, renowned for her dazzling imagination and radical creativity. Whilst living in Bristol for most of the 1960s, she took a degree in English Literature, started writing novels, played folk music and took art classes. To commemorate 25 years since her death in 1992, Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Fiona Robinson curated a major art exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela […]

The life and legacy of artist, activist, eco-feminist and writer Monica Sjöö (1938-2005)

The Women For Life on Earth march took place in 1982 and as we pass 2022, 40 years later we are drawn back to the work of Monica Sjöö, artist, activist and writer, who continued to hope that the struggle, courage and sacrifices, particularly of women imbued with Her trust in the Goddess would make the difference to our protection of Gaia, our Earth Mother. Monica was a Swedish born visual artist, resident in Bristol and her paintings and writing were foundational to the development of feminist […]

The 1970s Counterculture in the West Country

The story of the Bath Arts Workshop

Front cover of Bath Arts Workshop: Counterculture in the 1970s with people in fancy dress in front of shop in Walcot Street, Bath

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 […]

Angela Carter and the Bristol counterculture

A radical history walk in Clifton and Hotwells

Steve Hunt of Bristol Radical History Group will lead a stroll around some old haunts associated with Angela Carter and the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Join Steve to reimagine the area around Hotwells and Clifton when it was a hotbed of what Angela Carter called "Provincial Bohemia." Angela Carter is widely appreciated as one of the most creative and engaging English writers of the late Twentieth Century, being author of such bestsellers as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and […]