London radical histories and possibilities
The 1926 General Strike around the Elephant Castle Amended text of a walk organised by past tense in May 2026 around the Elephant area, attended by some 60 people. Start: The Obelisk, St George’s Circus In the aftermath of World War 1, as the British war economy was returned to ‘peacetime’ working conditions, the [ ]
Saving Tooting s Commons After a struggle lasting a number of years, an attempt to enclose and build over a large part of Tooting’s Commons was defeated in 1871, when a court blocked the enclosures. Over the next four years later the Commons were bought for the public. But the road by which public access for [ ]
The text of a talk given by Alex Hodson of Past Tense, at Sydenham Library, Southeast London, in May 2026, hosted by Calico Libraries part of Lewisham s Borough of Sanctuary events. Mayday and the Rights of Common Thou art here indicted by the name of Flora, of the City of Rome, in the County [ ]
This is a post about a Reclaim the Streets action in 1997, the police response to it, and the police infiltration of activism that we now know underpinned the event. Preface 1: This is a very long blog post, and could be confusing. Maybe it should be read as two posts one about the [ ]
On 19th January 1999 Roger Sylvester died, eight days after being after being arrested by police officers and taken to a psychiatric hospital. Restrained outside his home by eight police officers from Tottenham Police Station, he later collapsed and fell into a coma after being held down by officers for 20 minutes in a padded [ ]
The battle for Wimbledon Green Following on from a previous post detailing the long and intricate campaign that preserved Wimbledon Common from enclosure in the 1860s… a reminder that not all campaigns to save open space from that era were successful. Wimbledon Green was a small piece of land, possibly roughly triangular, which stood next [ ]
Swamps, huge and inundate St George’s Fields was a large open space lying between Southwark and Lambeth, lying between modern Newington Causeway/Borough High Street to the east, and Kennington Road/Baylis Road to the west. Of old it stretched as far as the village of Newington in the south (around modern Elephant Castle), and as [ ]
An account of how the squatted anarchist 121 Bookshop/ 121 Centre was targeted by undercover police officers (‘spycops’) working for the Metropolitan Police Special Branch’s ‘Special Demonstrations Squad’ (SDS) in the 1980s and 1990s. This article is written by one person formerly involved in 121. This is an incomplete article; this is not just because [ ]
Squatted army camps in South Buckinghamshire After the Second World War, homelessness, a shortage of homes due to bomb damage, millions of ex-servicemen suddenly returning from the war, and chronic overcrowding sparked a nationwide movement of squatting. In 1946 there was an outbreak of squatting in Wycombe (a Municipal Borough) and Amersham (a Rural District) in [ ]
DAN CHATTERTON: ATHEISTIC, COMMUNISTIC SCORCHER 1820-1895 Who does not remember, in the stormy days of 87, a pale, haggard old man, who used to climb the platform at meetings of the unemployed, or in the closely packed Socialist lecture halls, and pour forth wild denunciations of the robbery and injustice that flourishes in our rotten [ ]