Shahmima Akhtar explores a postcard from the Irish village of ‘Ballymaclinton’, a display at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London created to promote an Irish soap brand and a politically white Irish unionism.
Radical Objects
Radical Object: The Black Report
The Black Report, a landmark critique of health inequalities that barely discussed ‘race’, turns forty today. Grace Redhead and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn investigate the legacy of the report for the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
Radical Object: A Fragile Commemoration of a Brutal Deportation
From a fragile piece of printed tissue, Martin Plaut uncovers the forgotten story of a massive demonstration on the eve of the First World War, protesting the brutal deportation from South Africa to Britain of nine trades union leaders who had confronted the government of Generals Smuts and Botha.
Radical Object: Harriet Delph and Frances Garlick’s Grave
What can a mid-20th century monument to two women in Hackney tell us about women’s work and experience? Laura Gowing delves into the intertwined lives and friendship of Harriet Delph and Frances Garlick.
Radical Object: Walter Crane’s The Workers’ Maypole (1894)
First published in 1894 in Justice, Walter Crane’s The Workers’ Maypole declares ‘the cause of labour is the hope of the world’. Powerful yet whimsical, The Workers Maypole brings together English folk tradition and the demands of the international labour movement.
Radical Object: Spanish flu badge, 1918-19
Martin Plaut unearths a Radical Object: the badge struck to commemorate the Spanish flu pandemic that followed the First World War.
Radical Object: Covert Broadcasts and the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign
During the 1960s an anti-war pirate radio station, ‘Voice of Nuclear Disarmament’, broadcast covertly through television sets across Greater London. Charlie Morgan delves into compelling recordings of the anti-nuclear movement, which are now preserved at the British Library Sound Archive.
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