We live in an era when the politics of urban space is ever more contested – and an era when everyone wants a piece of it. Cities’ identities are traduced by global banks and sportswear companies selling their wares through the shameless co-option of urban cool and civic pride. In London, the intensity of the housing bubble, overseas financial investment and state-backed boosterism and gentrification threaten to erase the very markers of local culture, cosmopolitanism and history that made the capital a saleable place. To put it bluntly: it’s hard to enjoy the historic pub or curry house if it’s been turned into a chain hotel.
With this erasure, something else is also at risk of disappearing behind the construction hoardings – a history of agitators and strikers, match girls and anti-fascists. And it is this that David Rosenberg is determined to bring to the fore. In this expanded second edition of Rebel Footprints, the London-born historian adds two new chapters, taking us through great rallies and protests of the 19th century, from stories of suffragettes in Parliament Square to East End Jewish immigrants spreading the revolutionary gospel in Yiddish.
For years, Rosenberg has led regular walks tracing the history of the radical East End and it is the idea that the past comes alive when you get out and look for it that he deploys here. To that end, each chapter traces a particular theme, location and moment – the Chartists in 19th-century Clerkenwell or striking factory workers in early 20th-century Bermondsey – and then follows it with a map and a guided walk. It is lively and entertaining, written with the kind of eye for colourful detail that you would expect from a tour guide.
The chapter on the match girls’ strike in 1880s Bow is particularly energetic; 1,400 impoverished, largely Irish women walked out of the Bryant & May factory in the name of better pay and conditions and inspired the nearby dockworkers – many of them their brothers, husbands and fathers – to do the same. Today, the Bryant & May buildings are still standing, but transformed into Bow Quarter, a gated complex of luxury flats with an on-site gym and swimming pool, in a gentrifying area still beset by poverty. In 2012, it made headlines when the Ministry of Defence positioned surface-to-air missiles on its rooftops as part of the Olympic security arrangements.
The gentrification and surveillance of London makes protest harder. Meanwhile, the subtle privatisation of the city, not just via gated housing communities but pseudo-public space like that around Canary Wharf or London’s City Hall (both are privately owned), shows how urban land itself is not politically neutral. Rebel Footprints reminds us that famous locations such as Trafalgar Square are not just empty platforms on which politics occur, but spaces that contain politics – in their history and even in their design.
Most recently, Extinction Rebellion has reiterated how much geography can shape politics, with protest camps and bridge blockades used as tools, recalling demonstrations that stretch back centuries. There were workers camping out in Trafalgar Square in the 1880s, while protests over issues as diverse as unemployment, Ireland and free speech drew tens of thousands there to make their voices heard. So much has changed and so little.
• Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History by David Rosenberg is published by Pluto Press (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
