David Rosenberg’s
East End Walks Newsletter •41•
January 2020
david@eastendwalks.com www.eastendwalks.com
In this newsletter:
- NEW WALK and Forthcoming walks • Rebel history courses
- East End Exhibitions • Radical roots
Happy New Year! Happy new decade! Welcome to my latest newsletter. If this is your first one, I send out a newsletter to my East end Walks mailing list roughly every 3 months with details of walks coming up, news of courses I am teaching, and other East End related items. Hope you find this one interesting and useful…
NEW WALK and Forthcoming walks
I am very pleased to announce the launch of my brand new walk: “Stories from the Streets: Radical Hackney 1790s to 1990s” which I have been developing in recent weeks/months with help and encouragement from my friend Simon Lynn. I wrestled with the title quite a bit but was very happy with it in the end because many of the stories I’ll be telling on the walk are about events and actions that took place on the streets rather than smoke-filled meeting rooms. The challenge of doing a walk in Hackney is not straying too far as to make it impossible to complete within the time frame, but making sure that within that circuit there is a lot of dramatic material – which there is!
As you will see from the list below I will be doing this walk twice in the next three months. I did a tiny bit of pre-publicity and already have 11 bookings for the February date so if you are planning to come to the first one please book soon.
These are all the walks for the general public I will be doing in the next few weeks:
Sunday 16th February, 10.30am-1pm: NEW WALK! Stories from the Streets: Radical Hackney 1790s-1990s
Sunday 1 March, 2pm-4.30pm: The Russian Revolution and the East End
Sunday 15th March, 11am-1pm: Fighters for Equality – suffragettes, anti-racists and enemies of Empire (Westminster)
Sunday 29th March, 2pm-4.30pm: Anti-Fascist Footprints: a walk through the 1930s East End
Sunday 5 April, 10.30am-1pm: NEW WALK! Stories from the Streets: Radical Hackney 1790s-1990s
You can book any of these walks between now and the beginning of April online at http://www.eastendwalks.com/?page_id=82
All walks are accessible. The fees are £8/£5 unwaged
Rebel History Courses
City Lit: I will be teaching an 8-part course (including 6 walks) on Tuesday afternoons (2.45-4.45pm) from 28th April, called: “From the 1880s-1930s: How the New East End was born”The first and lass sessions will be at the City Lit (near Holborn), the others out on the road. Several times over recent few years the course has been booked up early, so if you would like to guarantee a place please book as soon as you can. Full details and booking are here: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/from-the-1880s-to-the-1930s-how-the-new-east-end-was-born
East End exhibitions
Unite and Resist! Protests in the East End 1970-2000 Until15th February 2020
This exhibition showcases original archives that illustrate the prolific activism of the people of Tower Hamlets in the latter decades of the twentieth century. From the Stepney School Strike to the Battle of Brick Lane, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Stop Clause 28, the exhibition shines a light on these and other important moments in the borough’s recent history including several lesser known struggles. This period of rapid change saw Tower Hamlets residents forming independent collectives and rising up in protest in response to a variety of emerging threats. Despite the constant flux in the local area during these three decades, East Enders’ persistent resistance to racism and fascism recurs throughout the exhibition. The display features banners, badges, garments, posters, photographs, pamphlets and other archives which provide important evidence of these sometimes short-lived campaigns. Most of the items on display have been newly acquired or newly catalogued and have never before been on public display. at Tower Hamlets Local history library, 277 Bancroft road, E1 4DQ http://www.ideastore.co.uk/local-history-whats-on
Radical Roots
In connection with this exhibition, Tower hamlets local history Library/archive are putting on a special event from 11am-4pm on Saturday 18th Januarycalled “Radical Roots: Researching Rebels in your family history”
11.00 | A Beginner’s Guide to Family History & Researching Rebellious Ancestors
Topics covered will include interviewing relatives, finding clues in family documents and photographs, tracking down and interpreting birth, marriage, death and census records, plus an introduction to sources for researching rebellious ancestors.
Led by Robert Jones, from Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
11.00 – 13.00 | Family zine-making workshop
Join Celeste Bell, daughter of punk icon Poly-Styrene to capture your family history in a zine and learn more about artist Celeste’s own journey of finding out about her Somali East End roots. Suitable for ages 8+.
12.00 | Researching your Somali Family History
Do you want to find out more information about Somali ancestors but not sure where to start? Join Kinsi Abdulleh from Numbi Arts who has supported many such enquiries, using her knowledge of extended family networks in the East End and other dockland areas in the UK in which the first generation of Somali seamen working on British ships came to settle.
13.00 | The Matchgirls Strike of 1888: Perspective of a Local Girl, Sarah Chapman
The Match Girls Strike of 1888 brought the women and girls working in a factory Bow to national attention. Sam Johnson will discuss how she discovered the involvement of her great-grandmother Sarah Chapman, one of the workers at the factory and a resident of Stepney. Join us for this inspirational tale of bringing an unsung heroine to light.
14.00 | A Black & British History: Jamaican Slaves Who Abolished Slavery
In this talk, Paul Crooks will implicate his ancestors in Jamaica’s Baptist War – which ultimately brought the British system of slavery to its knees. Paul will reveal what he researched about the forgotten history of ‘The Jamaican slaves who abolished slavery’.
Led by Paul Crooks, Author of Ancestors and A Tree Without Roots
15.00 | Writing your Family History
Based around a couple of examples of privately published family histories, this session will encourage people to be ambitious with the results of their research – don’t just research your family history, write it too! Almost all families have interesting stories waiting to be uncovered: protesters, strikers, ne’er do wells – you just need to find an angle and you can create a readable piece of work that is so much more than a list of names and dates. Led by Andrew Lewis, from Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
Hope to see you on a walk, on a course, or at an event soon!
David
- If you would prefer not to receive these occasional mailings from East End Walks please email me to let me know: david@eastendwalks.com
