On the afternoon of 20 August 2025, the History Workshop editorial team (2024–25) made a collective trip to the History Workshop archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. To mark one hundred issues of the History Workshop Journal, we – as editors of the History Workshop magazine – were curious to explore the archive of the movement from which the journal emerged. Organised by Beckie Rutherford and with the assistance of archivist Stef Dickers, we each selected a number of folders to browse through before coming together to discuss what we had found. The text below is an edited version of our conversation in the archive.
Beckie Rutherford:
Before today, I was really interested in looking at files related to oral history and the methods that were being experimented with by the early HWJ editors. I wanted to find a sense of the excitement generated by pioneering this new method of doing history and exactly how it was being developed within the History Workshop collective.
The thing I’ve been struck by the most so far is that, seemingly right from the outset, their approach was incredibly methodical and carefully thought-out. Something I was looking at just now was a seven-page document on the technicalities of how to record and considerations about the necessary equipment. It felt very modern and similar to the sort of thing I associate with the Oral History Society nowadays – it reminded me of the guidelines that I drew upon during my own process of doing oral histories in 2020 and beyond. The early HWJ editors seem to have been similarly well prepared and comprehensive, in a way that I didn’t expect. I assumed that their discussions around how to do oral history would feel a bit more uncertain and experimental, but they seem to have known exactly what they were doing with it from the very beginning.
Marybeth Hamilton:
I was interested in a bunch of things. I was interested in how much you’d be able to see the kind of collegiality, friendship, and intimacies that I know were there – and still are, in many ways – making this a collective rather than just a board. But the material I’ve read doesn’t show that so much, because it’s their outward face. It’s very much about what happens when you start translating this enterprise to the outside world: how far they move from their self-publishing, cut-and-paste-and-stick beginnings, and how they navigate negotiations with publishers as the publishing industry is changing.
One of the things occurring to me is how many echoes there are of questions we’re raising now. There are editorials about attacks on history and universities, and a sense of what an unpropitious time it is to be doing something like this – the dead ends of professionalisation for the kind of enterprise they want to undertake, and the fact that publishing is becoming less and less friendly to the impulses of the 1960s that they were born from.
One thing I am seeing that I did expect is the very tactile methods they used to generate ideas. We were talking earlier about the note-taking on a single sheet of scrap paper – gluing that into the centre of a piece of paper, putting it in a hole punch, then filing it – and you can see articles built out of things pulled together from different files. It’s exciting to see it as a creative enterprise taking place in that way.
Elly Robson:
I wonder whether the tensions you’re describing around publishing come out of the fact that History Workshop was born of a moment of both the democratisation of higher education and its professionalisation at the same time. It’s both increasing its reach while simultaneously creating a set of professional standards that make it narrower and more gatekept in other ways, in terms of what’s considered of value.
I thought it was really interesting when someone mentioned wanting it to be a socialist journal of history, to keep out the careerists. I was trying to imagine if anybody would say that today. I don’t think they would, partly because people want careers and to get paid – fair enough – but also because the wider social conditions of people’s lives have changed so much. Housing was a much smaller part of your expenditure, squatting was far more prevalent, people could have part time jobs and still get by. Something about the capacity for voluntary association has massively changed today, I think, even as the internet has opened up easier, quicker forms of engaging in this work.
When I first began working on the History Workshop digital magazine, we used to do a lot more social media promotion of other people’s events. People would send things to the inbox and we’d share information about them. But it just became overwhelming in the information sphere we live in to do anything more than be our own platform. The networking capacity of the internet has in some ways been eroded by the information overload that everybody experiences, because it’s so much work to collate all that information, create those connections, and then keep refreshing it. That’s challenging whether you’re doing a bulletin or trying to maintain a page on the internet listing all the radical history groups in London.
Marral Shamshiri:
That really comes through in the editorial collective meeting minutes from 1979–81, which I’ve been looking at. There’s a constant sense of people feeling overwhelmed, overburdened, and overworked. There’s a very gendered aspect to it, which comes up a few times. What’s quite interesting is that it comes up and then it’s discussed, and there are actually productive ways of working through it. Though I found it striking that one of the issues was that they couldn’t cover more feminist work because the women were too overburdened. It was still seen as feminist scholarship being women’s domain.
Elly Robson:
I think we still see something of that dynamic when we think about commissioning work from scholars of colour, and particularly Black historians. There are so few Black historians in senior positions in the academy that they carry a disproportionate burden of that kind of work.
Marral Shamshiri:
I keep coming back to this tension between the bureaucratised, professional academic work of the journal and the heart and spirit of its politics, what it represents. That comes through in these documents. You have the meeting minutes, quite dry, and then interspersed with them you get the odd letter or reflection from a member of the collective really speaking from the heart. They talk quite a bit, or you get a sense of, this real anxiety of believing in the project, wanting to have a foot in the academic world but not losing the relevance and the commitment to the broader movement or project they’re part of.
There were maybe two or three letters reflecting on it now being the 1980s, looking back on the previous decade. There’s a real sense of almost pessimism – of the 1960s feeling like a time when the wind was behind their backs, and now things feel different. It has a very global worldview: Third World liberation movements haven’t been successful, revolutionary struggles haven’t gone where people thought they would. But they’re really working through those questions and trying to see where the journal fits. I suppose that’s always a relevant question: what do we do in these moments?
Vivien Chan:
I’m just about to start a file from the end of 1981 on correspondence and minutes, specifically about the History Workshop Journal crisis and future organisation. I think there will be some really interesting reflections on exactly what you’ve just described – where do we go from here, how do we return? Knowing that the History Workshop television project is coming makes it interesting to see how quickly they were turning things around and with what impetus.
Some of the most interesting files I’ve seen are the handwritten notes from early 1975 prior to the official editorial version of the History Workshop manifesto, and a diary entry about where the ideas came from. Raphael Samuel is very explicit about his reasons: on the one hand, extreme personal distress, and on the other, a growing awareness of the political definition and international extension of the workshop. There’s this real sense of connecting a personal, almost existential crisis with the bigger impetus, of using History Workshop, or the reasons for History Workshop, to generate a personal sense of purpose.
Elly Robson:
Which is something I feel too, whenever I talk about the History Workshop aspect of my job, I always say that it’s basically what I think the point of history is. And, maybe I would have felt more existential despair about doing academic history if I didn’t have History Workshop.
Vivien Chan:
The first couple of files I looked at were collations of existing articles, book announcements, and press releases. I’d chosen one on the spirit of place, so very much about local history. Just to hold something like that – knowing that someone, Anna Davin, had put together this file with a sense of the national picture, all of these small oral history projects as well as something as big and national as the History Workshop television project, is remarkable. You still feel that when you talk to Anna today. It’s amazing to see it as this archive of thinking.
Mary Newman:
So, I started by looking at the thoughts behind History Workshop 14, which took place in November 1980 and was about language and power. It came out of a 1979 meeting of the collective, when Raphael pushed strongly for a discussion of language, literature, and literacy in relation to history. The collective agreed this was innovative but also quite urgent, though they weren’t entirely sure why.
They planned a very large workshop for around 500 people, but worried that more might show up, which seems extraordinary for an academic conference nowadays. They broke it down into five areas of language: the language of learning; the language of socialism; class and ideology; languages of power and resistance; language and historical change; and experience and the language of history. These seem like massive topics, and the sub-plenaries ranged from reading the language of Shakespeare to the deterioration of Welsh language education in the nineteenth century.
I could feel that urgency, but as someone who works in the realm of language and history, I found it difficult to place. And then the discussion seems to disappear entirely after that event. They seemed to also be very concerned about the influence of elitism. There was a big discussion about whether the call for plenary speakers should be open, because they worried an open call would simply attract careerists and white men who wanted to speak.
What I found striking was that in this discussion about language and power, there was no discussion of the language they were using themselves, which was, of course, always English. In research groups today, the language we default to is often the first thing we address in these spaces, so I thought that was a notable absence.
I also looked at History Workshop television documents, which I hadn’t really heard of before. It appears to have been incredibly successful. They partnered very early on with Channel Four and wrote a proposal for a load of programmes and substantial funding that was set to last about a decade. As far as I can see, that’s the only proposal they made, there aren’t records of them approaching anyone else. What I took from that was the ambition: they saw television as a way to reach people, they committed to making it work, and they went straight in.
Channel Four seemed to really embrace it. There’s a fascinating series of books Channel Four themselves published, based on their documentaries. There was, for instance, a three-part documentary in the late 1980s on birth control, which discussed the history but also guided people on how they could record their own history. The first major series, ‘The Factory’, involved around seventy hours of interviews in Cowley in Oxford, and viewers were told, through cartoons, how they could either contribute material for future television programmes or create their own archives.
I find it fascinating that there was clearly a massive organisation behind this. I haven’t yet reached the end of why there is no longer a History Workshop television project, because the programmes seem to have been incredibly popular. Viewership was very high. They had regular Sunday evening slots. The documentaries covered topics we’d still recognise on Channel Four now: the failure of the school system, the care system. It’s interesting that we were a part of that.
It seems they were working a great deal with the East London History Workshop, and they started out sharing that space until the History Workshop television project outgrew it. It seems to have come specifically from the East London group. Interestingly, I didn’t see any mention of the BBC, they clearly went straight to Channel Four and secured the funding. There’s a full budget breakdown of what they were asking for, it seems like a lot. They had a massive plan and they were almost building the television equivalent of the journal.
Elly Robson:
Which is in such stark contrast to how many issues they were facing with academic publishers.
Marral Shamshiri:
There are also a few references in the documents to provincialism. This idea that the journal was really trying to avoid the kind of narrow specialisation of topics. When you look at some of the articles being submitted, the scope is always so much broader. Today we’ve been pushed into ever smaller sub-specialisms, and it’s almost as if we’ve forgotten the really big themes that can speak to people. I wonder if that breadth, like in the language and history workshop, was intentional at the time, a deliberate pushback against over specialisation.
Elly Robson:
Constructing a popular history is about lowering the bar to participation. What we do at History Workshop is lower that bar constantly. If somebody reads about early modern wetlands in the seventeenth-century Humber Estuary, no one is going to think: yes, I want to read about that. But if you publish a series on wetlands that thinks through the temporal and geographical connections between different types of wetlands and their dynamics, then people might be more interested.
It’s interesting that without explicitly knowing the history of the History Workshop movement, we’ve been tapping into that ethos instinctively. That’s what struck me when Mary was talking about the language and history workshop, it’s the kind of thing that would never work in a traditional academic space, but works so well for us.
Mary Newman:
It also seems like organising History Workshop 14 was quite stressful. There were a lot of polite but firm disagreements about who should speak, how they should speak, and who was organising what. I wonder whether the sheer scale of the topic, combined with the group’s heightened attention to the politics and power dynamics of who gets a platform, made it far more demanding than a conventional academic conference would be.
Elly Robson:
Perhaps this is also what happens when you’re more engaged with the politics and power dynamics of who speaks than you would normally find at an academic conference. At an academic conference, people aren’t having highly politicised conversations about that, whereas if you’re coming at it from a more activist perspective, those questions consume so much more of your time and energy.