From 1882 and the beginnings of the numerous visits by Peter Kropotkin to the Tyneside riots of 1991, for the first time a full and comprehensive study of anarchism and the anarchists in the North East of England. Written with personal insight, this is a no pulled punches analysis of a hundred and ten years of struggle. A study from the grassroots, from those at the forefront of activity, not those ‘distanced from actual events and looking in from the outside with their academic vanity’. Written not by academics but by anarchists this book hopes to go some way towards filling the gap in the recorded history of the role anarchists have played in the political struggles around the Tyneside area. Revealing the struggles both within and without the anarchist scene - up till recent memory - to scrutiny gives us plenty to learn from in our future course of activism.
This is our history, and this is the purpose of our history. This is our culture, a culture of resistance to the state and its enforced fallacies of indoctrination, control and coercion. And hopefully, this is our future, for the sake of our children or our children’s children, who we may hope can live a life without the destructive nature of capitalism, and a planet recovered from its devastating ravages.