The opening stages of the French Revolution helped generate widespread enthusiasm for reform in Britain. It did so especially amongst a group of intellectual and literary women and men who contributed to the emerging ‘revolution controversy’ in pamphlets, poetry and novels and were bonded together by acquaintance and friendship in an increasingly febrile political atmosphere.
Dan Chatterton (1820-1895) was – in his own words ‘one of the revolutionary type of workers for political and social advancement’. This History Workshop podcast takes us in the footsteps of Dan Chatterton, who was born 200 years ago this year. Andrew Whitehead leads listeners around Chatterton’s London – beginning at the revolutionary Clerkenwell Green, through some of Chatterton’s favourite haunts in Holborn and Soho, and finishing at the British Museum – with readings from and about Chatterton along the way.
A new digital resource allowing users to explore former sites of Jewish memory in East London went online this week. On it you will find audio interviews, photographs, and essays about more than 70 sites (we hope to include more in future) that consistently appear in people’s recollections of Jewish East London. The memory map aims to create a lasting document of both the history and memory traces of the Jewish East End and attempts to bring the stories and memories of this rapidly vanishing landscape to new audiences.
Jennifer Davis finds historical precedent for the tragedy at Grenfell Tower in Victorian era Kensington’s Jennings’ Buildings.
The British Museum reading room opened in 1857 and was, until recently, the main reading room of the British Library. Phil Cohen gives a moving and at times very funny account of how his life as a (sometime) shoplifter, Situationist, squatter and sociologist has been deeply entwined with the British Library Reading Room and the surrounding London streets.
‘Made in Dagenham’, the new film by Nigel Cole and Stephen Woolley, captures a key moment in British trade union history. It’s about the landmark strike in 1968 by women machinists at Ford’s factory.
Toby Butler interviews a lock keeper at Molesey Lock on the river Thames
