It may not be May Day, but with the government – a Labour government understandably, even if not a socialist government – having nationalised much of the banking system, it’s entirely appropriate that this Saturday (11 October) I am conducting my Reds, Radicals & Revolutionaries walk in London.
Why a radical London walk here and not in bolshie Brick Lane or militant Marylebone? Well, the area we’re covering – Finsbury, Clerkenwell – has historically been the most radical in London. It was the first suburb outside London to have a significant population, and, being outside the City walls, there was land on the edge of the Forest of Middlesex where people could meet to air their grievances. For a long time it was an area of poverty, the masses living in the shadow of three great religious institutions: St Mary’s Nunnery, St John’s Priory and Charterhouse monastery, all of which are gone, although remnants survive.
From the early 18th century Clerkenwell was a haven of craftsmen and artisans: engravers, publishers, locksmiths, clock-makers. But alongside the artisans in their workshops were the slums and hovels, as captured by Dickens in the shape of Fagin’s Den from Oliver Twist. Or as the Illustrated London News put it in an article on 22 May 1847:
“In Clerkenwell there is grovelling starving poverty. In Clerkenwell broods the darkness of utter ignorance. In its lanes and alleys the lowest debauch, the coarsest enjoyment, the most infuriate passions, the most unrestrained vice roar and riot.”
The first recorded instance of radical activity locally dates back to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 when Wat Tyler and his troupe camped on Clerkenwell Green here before destroying the nearby priory of St John. Wind on a few centuries, and during the war on revolutionary France in August 1794 crowds attacked army recruiting offices on Mutton Lane at the south side of the Green. Their point was that “we, the people” should be helping the revolution, not joining the militia in putting it down.
On 16 April 1838 a large crowd gathered on the Green to welcome the Tolpuddle Martyrs back to England. Four years later, during the Chartist agitation of 1842, the Tory prime minister, Robert Peel, banned public meetings from taking place here, so there was a bit of a lull. But in 1867 there were protests on the Green against the proposed hanging of three Fenians in Manchester, in 1871 there was a demo in support of the Paris Commune, and most famously of all on 13 November 1887 Annie Besant and William Morris addressed a large crowd in favour of the right to assembly, and marched to Trafalgar Square where a riot that became known as Bloody Sunday took place. In 1890 the world’s first May Day march left from Clerkenwell Green and it continues to do so.
All around are signs of the area’s radical history, which presumably hasn’t ended yet. On the south side of the Green is the Marx Memorial Library, which contains some 100,000 books, pamphlets, tracts and publications. Its collection includes the first published English translation of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, the suffragettes’ Votes for Women and William Morris’s Commonweal.
The building was originally a Welsh charity school. In the 1870s it became home to the London Patriotic Club, a radical organisation co-founded by John Stuart Mill that supported trade unionism, universal suffrage and republicanism and, unusually for the time, was open to women. Engels and Eleanor Marx were visitors, though never Marx himself. Later the premises was bought by William Morris for the Twentieth Century Press, one of Britain’s first left-wing print works, which produced the weekly journal, Justice, (“The Organ of the Social Democracy”) and issued some of the earliest editions of Marx and Engels.
Here V I Lenin himself came in 1902 after landing in London, a city far more accommodating to revolutionaries than those places he was familiar with in Russia and Germany. At what is now the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green Lenin produced his Communist paper, Iskra (The Spark). The future Soviet leader worked in a room so cramped that, according to the Russian, “there was no room for another chair”.
This was Lenin’s first view of London: “We at once began to look round at this citadel of capitalism with curiosity but we found all those ox-tails, skates fried in fat and indigestible cakes were not made for Russian stomachs.” Lenin lived on Holford Square, half a mile west of the Angel, in a house bombed in WWII. Early in 1903 he was visited by Trotsky whom he took on a tour of London by bus. Lenin pointed out the main sites, “This is their famous Westminster Abbey”…They went to a socialist church in Seven Sisters. As they left Lenin turned to Trotsky and said: “The English proletariat has in itself many revolutionary and socialist elements but they are mixed up with Conservatism, religion and prejudices and there seems to be no way that these elements can come to the top.”
In that he was right.
If you’d like to hear more stories like these, come on the walk. If you can’t make it but are interested in the topic there are plenty of stories like these in my London Compendium tome. I will be repeating the walk some time later in the year.
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Born in Dalston, London, Ed Glinert has written for Private Eye, Radio Times and London's Time Out, and is the author of various London and Manchester guide books and compendiums. He leads a variety of walks for a major London walking tours company.
See all books by Ed Glinert
Author: Ed Glinert
Date: 9 October 2008
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