This is a legacy website: I will not be updating this website any more (2020).
For my database of political meetings and maps, please go to my new website: http://historyofpublicspace.uk/political-meetings-mapper-2/
Movements for the vote and workers’ rights in 19th century Britain fought for the right to meet and to speak in public space. Popular protests contested the meaning of ‘public’ in public space.
This website accompanies the book Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 by Katrina Navickas (Manchester University Press, 2015).
You can use the data and information on this site, but please credit it to me with the url of the page.
Protest and the Politics of Space and Place Extended by Katrina Navickas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Especially during the repressive era from the mid-17 to the 18, radicals faced violence if they met together in public. Repressive laws, popular reprisals, and infiltration by government spies limited movement organizing, though radical groups periodically rebuilt significant support. Most famously, in August 1819, sixty thousand peacefully gathered at St. Peter’s Field outside Manchester to agitate for universal manhood suffrage, only to be forcibly dispersed by troops. Yet the publicity generated by Peterloo, Navickas argues, helped unify geographically disparate radical movements through “organized demonstrations of mourning, combined with defiance” (p. 87). While forced to typically heed government restrictions on public assembly, dissent took unusual forms, notably during the public bonfires and celebrations of the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820. Radicals increasingly clustered in “outlier spaces” of the sprawling industrial communities, organizing on the margins and awaiting further opportunities (p. 106).