Review A People’s History of London
London – theatre of political activism
BY NICHOLAS MURRAY
Peasants’ Revolt – fight comes to London
As the corporate executives and sponsors are sped along the specially designated traffic lanes from Central London to the Olympic site in Stratford, while the rest of us wait for a bus, it’s probably the right moment to read a history of London from the point of view of ordinary people rather than those at the top. John Rees and Lindsey German have written A People’s
History of London (published by Verso), an immensely readable history which reflects London’s radical traditions and the role of the labour movement in the life of the city. Both authors insist that official history still seems to deny the full weight and importance of a people’s history that stretches back to the Peasants’ Revolt in the 1380s to the growth of trade unions in the 19th and 20th centuries. “London was the head and fountain of the revolt,” says John
Rees, of the English Revolution of the mid 17th century. It’s interesting to learn from the book that St Paul’s, site of the recent anti-capitalist protest camp, has long been a centre of radical protest. Such memories and echoes have always been part of the
labour movement’s sense of history and inspiration and one can read about such pivotal moments as the Chartist agitation, the 1888 match girls’ strike, “the Docker’s tanner”, the 1926 General Strike, the 1958 Notting Hill riots and countless other landmarks.
30 uniteWORKS July/August 2012 Rees and German call their book, “the story of London as a
theatre of political activism.” They argue that the very things that make London a centre of wealth and power, what Wat Tyler called “this rich and puissant city”, have also made it a centre of dissent and radicalism, particularly London’s port and the vast working class concentration of the East End. “The East End was a crucible of struggle and radicalism,”
Lindsey explains. The book is particularly strong on the battle for the new unions in the 1880s. “The strikes of the unskilled London workers in those years,” write Rees and German, “wrote a new page of working class history, and their organisation led to the establishment of the two main general workers’ unions – today’s Unite and GMB.” The story comes right up to today with the recent
protests and such phenomena as the “social cleansing” of the Olympic site that glitters today in the world’s TV cameras, while youth and sports facilities are cut in the government’s austerity programme. “You don’t know where you’re going until you know
where you’ve been,” says Lindsey, convinced that every generation needs to know what has been experienced and achieved in the past. This book is an essential starting point to acquire that knowledge.
Clifford Harper
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