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Research spotlight: Learning from Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham

As part of an update on the People’s Papers project, PhD researcher Arielle shares a recap of our recent online webinar and more about the inspiring panelists we heard from.

On Tuesday, we had a very well attended online workshop (with over 180 RSVPs!) where we got to hear from some very inspiring panelists about their experiences with the alternative and community newspapers in the 1970s in Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham (and beyond!). For those who couldn’t make it, we also have a recording of the event which is now available on the library’s YouTube channel. 

Archiving The People's Papers Recording Now Up On YouTube! with a button underneath that reads, "watch now".

In advance of the event, we had shared profiles of each paper and panelist on Instagram as part of a research spotlight series. In wrapping up this event, we thought it would be good to share a recap below and a way for people who are interested to learn more.

First up in the research spotlight series, we had Birmingham:

Though Dave Harte didn’t have direct personal experience in working on any of Birmingham’s alternative or community papers in the 1970s, he has a long history of writing about local journalism. Over the last few years he’s been taking a more historical focus in researching these local papers from the 1970s and 80s as well as working with collaborators to make sure the materials are archived. Recently, he’s co-curated an exhibit of these local publications titled ‘The City Speaks 1971-1979’ at the University library. This featured the contribution made by two important listings magazines, Grapevine (1971-75) and Broadside (1976-79), which documented the city’s social, economic, and cultural life during a transformative period marked by significant political and societal shifts. You can read more about the exhibit here: https://bcmcr.org/research/the-city-speaks-1971-1979/ 

Next up in the research spotlight series was Liverpool:

As a longtime journalist, Brian Whitaker shared about his experience with the Liverpool Free Press from the 1970s. The paper survived for six years and published 31 issues. He recently created an online archive of the paper, which includes a five-part history of the Free Press along with PDF files of all its pages: https://freepressarchive.com/ He has also established a related website, Liverpool People’s History, which makes extensive use of the Free Press archive. These are both amazing online resources, so I definitely recommend checking them out and browsing through to learn more!

Next up was Leeds:

Tony Harcup began working in the alternative local press in the 1970s and that experience has informed his journalism, his teaching and his research ever since. Tony has written extensively about Leeds Other Paper, which ran in West Yorkshire for a remarkable 20 years between 1974 and 1994 – and his 2012 book “Alternative Journalism, Alternative Voices” places that newspaper in the context of other local, national and international examples of independent media production. Over the last couple of years, Tony has given a number of talks on the history, significance and legacy of Leeds Other Paper as well as running the Remember LOP account on the social media platform Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/rememberlop.bsky.social.

Lastly, we also had a spotlight for Steve Poole’s previous project on Recovering the Regional Press: 

Accessible through its online website, this was a project based in the Regional History Centre at UWE Bristol and co-ordinated by Phil Chamberlain (Journalism) and Professor Steve Poole (History) with Jess Baines as the Research Associate. It continues to be an amazing resource of one of the most comprehensive listings of the papers as well as providing an accompanying map and blog posts. Steve joined the webinar discussion to share about this important previous work and help set the broader context for the specific papers we were looking at. Steve’s background is as a Professor of History and Heritage at UWE, Bristol and has published widely on social movements, political protest and criminality in England in the long eighteenth century c1715-1832 and has a particular interest in histories of South West England ‘from below’. His most recent book, co-written with Nick Rogers, is Bristol From Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City (Boydell, 2017).

 

Overall, the hope for this research spotlight series as well as the webinar was to be able to bring together related research and projects to learn from each other and encourage and connect as part of a broader conversation happening both on a more regional scale but also across disciplines and institutions. To that end, the webinar was a great success — we had such an interesting and knowledgeable mix of people attend and a very lively chat with hopefully many more connections to still develop!

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As a follow up to the event, we also sent out an email to everyone who RSVPed with links to more information and some of the resources and comments that had been shared in the chat. We have that re-shared below in case it’s of interest:

 

Thanks to everyone who joined us last week for the “Archiving the People’s Papers” webinar — it was great to have such an engaging and knowledgable audience as well as our stellar line up of speakers!

You can also find the key links and information from our speakers shared below:

 

You can also learn more about the ongoing People’s Papers project here (which has links to past blog posts etc) or follow along on Instagram or Bluesky now too.

 

We also have two more upcoming events:

 


  • Nov 4th: An in-person event in Manchester on “Revisiting 1970s Manchester” to share and wrap up the research with the WCML and also hear from folks involved at the time, hosted at the Central Public Library. We’re still looking for more people to share about their experiences if you know of anyone involved with local papers or urban activism in Greater Manchester in the 1970s!

 

There’s also a lot of other resources and various (some digitized) materials available a bit ad hoc on the internet or stored in local archives, so definitely worth some searching if you’re interested in learning more! Some digitized examples include: Hackney People’s Press (and history more broadly), Muther Grumble online archive, Chapeltown News also from Leeds, SE1 Community Newspaper on the internet archive, Mole Express via the Manchester Digital Music Archive and a website on Radical Brighton, amongst others.

 

While this current project is primarily focusing on Manchester and London (and NYC) based on my own archival research, I do think it would be great to build on all of this other important work (especially Steve’s project!) and try to bring these papers together and see how they can be activated and made more accessible today — perhaps there could be some kind of ongoing network or future gathering to discuss and connect further?

 

If you’re interested in this idea, I hope you can make it to one of the next events! But otherwise definitely feel free to be in touch and hopefully we can keep building these connections.

 

As a final follow up, there were also more resources and comments shared in the chat. I’ve tried to re-post these below as best I can but check out the recording for more detailed info and let me know if there’s anything I missed or that I should follow up on (i.e. that I could share on social media, etc.):

  • Phil Chamberlain has said there is a standing offer from the University of Bath library to store any hard copies of regional media which would be open to researchers.
  • Pat and Dennis are looking into archiving their community paper Bush News at Mayday Rooms in London (which has a great online and in-person social movement archival collection!)
  • The University of Leeds library has also digitised the entire run of the student paper, The Gryphon/Leeds Student.
  • There’s also related/adjacent projects to the newspapers such as the Leeds Animation Workshop. The exhibit ‘Animated Activism: Women Empowered,’ which features them, is on at the University of Leeds until December.
  • Rachel Matthews is running a project around local newspaper archives. There’s a newsletter to sign up to via emailing her at r.matthews@coventry.ac.uk or you can follow via LinkedIn.
  • Someone also mentioned the idea of how this might connect to the British Newspaper Archive (if anyone has contacts or interests in following that up)

 

Otherwise, I’m sure there’s more but that’s what I have for now! Thanks again to everyone for participating and I hope we can keep the conversation going.

 

All the best,

Arielle

  • Written by:
  • Nathan Godfrey
  • Category:
  • Blog
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