Nurturing Dissent? Community Printshops in 1970s London (2015)

Chapter 8 in Julie Uldam and Anne Vestergaard (eds). Civic Engagement and Social Media: Political Participation Beyond Protest. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137434159 Nurturing Dissent? Community Printshops in 1970s London By Jess Baines Born of a particular conjunction of community activism, cultural critique and technological possibility, self-managed ‘community printshops’ were set up in cities across the UK between the late 1960s and mid 1970s. The motivation to provide much-needed print resources for activists was accompanied by the aspiration that direct access to the means of print-media production could also foster social and political empowerment. They were part of an emergent phenomena of politically motivated ‘alternative left’ printshops that included poster collectives, printing co-operatives and ‘resource centres’ and which appeared in numerous cities. This general occurrence was not particular to the UK; similar workshops were established in other parts of Europe and north America in the same period (Cushing, 2012). Although there was variation in the UK use of the term ‘community printshop’, it mostly referred to a printshop that was a) ‘non-commercial’; b) had a connection to locally based activism (‘community’ being partially associated with geography); c) encouraged ‘user-participation’. It is this general definition that I will be using. As will become evident, the manner and extent to which each of these three factors played out varied both between printshops and within their individual existences. The mobilizing and ‘participatory’ potential of contemporary online media for the growth and sustainment of critical and creative civic engagement is, with good reason, being closely analysed by media scholars and commentators. In these analyses there are echoes of the earlier, ‘pre-internet’ ambitions and practices of the community printshops — as well as some of the challenges they faced. This is not the only resonance of course; the social history of new communications technology is littered with (unrealized) hopes for their possibility to empower civil society; the telegraph, the radio and the portable video recorder are amongst those heralded as such (Briggs & Burke, 2005, Couldry & Curran 2003). Recent years have witnessed a singular but notable reversal of this trend; in both the UK and the US there has been a resurrection of activist ‘analogue’ print media. The following quote is taken from a published celebration of this activity, Since the technology is easy to learn, people with little or no experience can represent themselves… Silkscreen allows lots of people to participate in the production and distribution of a print…. With control of production in the hands of the creators, the process is also very empowering (Moller in McPhee, 2009 p.51). The social(ist) construction of technology in this statement bears an uncannily close resemblance to the assertions of some of the early community printshops. It is also just such claims that in the community printshops’ specific historical context would, in time, be challenged. Generally then, I want to propose that the experiments of the late twentieth century community printshops have a place in the evolving narrative of social movement media practices. Specifically I want to trace how a range of particular London-based community printshops sought to support, sustain and initiate critical civic engagement. The instigation, aspirations, practices and narratives of the printshops cannot be detached from their changing discursive and material contexts and as such these aspects closely inform the discussion. The chapter draws on the Bourdieusian inspired notion of field (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2007) to conceptualise these ‘contexts’. In particular it follows Crossley’s (2002) proposition that social movements, or certain constellations of politicised activity can be usefully considered as ‘fields of contention’. That is, a distinct and dynamic social space (a ‘field’) constituted by the relations between different kinds of agents (individuals, groups, organisations, institutions), discourses, artefacts, resources, practices and contestations specific to it. Fields are sites of ‘strategic’ action, organised around particular stakes and claims to distinctive value. Struggles over the definition of that value and the nature of what is at stake are also what determine and shape a particular field. Fields are only ever relatively autonomous, especially those concerned to influence or change another field (for example the field of institutional politics), but also because they will always be impinged upon to varying degrees by other fields. They may also be ‘nested’ in or overlap with other fields and as with all aspects concerning a field, this is historical and dynamic rather than fixed (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2007). The community printshops began as one of the (many) constitutive elements or ‘agents’ in the emergent ‘field of urban community activism’. They were also coconstituents of a growing ‘field of alternative printshops’. The urban community activist field overlapped with the declining ‘field of 1960s counter culture’, and the emerging movement ‘field of women’s liberation’. By the early 1970s, it was part of a wider ‘field of leftist contention’ comprising various post-1968 social and protest movements and across which individuals, practices, discourses and resources traversed. The community printshops were shaped by — and arguably contributed to the shaping of — the ethos, practices, opportunities and culture of the field of community activism. Therefore consideration of key features of this field context assists us in mapping and making sense of their historical particularity and specific trajectories. The structure of the chapter is as follows; firstly key elements of the community activist field in which the printshops emerged are briefly set out, I then move to explain some of the ways that particular printshops attempted to initiate and empower critical civic engagement during their early years. The remainder of the chapter is then devoted to the various directions each took within various simultaneous and interrelated field contexts, including the decline of urban community activism, a changing wider field of leftist contention, Thatcherism and the advent of ‘municipal socialism’ (that is, changes in the field of institutional politics), as well as developments in the field of alternative printshops. The research draws on fifteen in-depth interviews with previous community printshops members, archival sources including leaflets, newspapers, newsletters and reports issued by the printshops, along with contemporaneous publications. The field of urban community activism The community printshops were part of the newly expanded field of urban community activism that ‘pervaded urban Britain’ between the late 1960s and late 1970s 1. It emerged after a period of increasing government intervention at the local level, from planning to the delivery of the post-war welfare state and largely in response (Smith & Jones 1981). Its concerns, activities and actors were diverse. By the early 1970s the field comprised a dynamic formation including tenants associations and squatting campaigns, anti-urban redevelopment protests, Claimants Unions, actions against racism and fascism, independent advice centres, women’s centres and playspaces, community newspapers and community arts activities. The common thread was the concern with the struggles of ordinary life outside of the workplace (the historical focus of the mainstream and revolutionary left). Key dimensions of the field particularly relevant to the instigation, practices and early trajectories of the printshops were; the involvement of ‘radicals’, ‘officially sponsored’ community activism and ‘community arts’. The radical interest in this ‘new’ political field came from various directions and was part of a wider proliferating field of contentious political and cultural activity. Much of this is well known; the anti-Vietnam war movement, student and workers protests both at home and around the world, a thriving counter culture, the growth of squatting and so on. The late 1960s and early 1970s were also a period of wide spread activism by working class tenants (Sklair, 1975). For many radicals this was more evidence of the growing ferment, the general struggle against profit, exploitation and repression and they joined the dots: ‘Solidarity with industrial, student and tenant strikers and liberation fronts all over the world’ (Poster Workshop c1968). The decline of the student, peace and anti-Vietnam war movements led participants from those particular protest fields into community activism, especially those that rejected the orthodoxies of the growing ‘revolutionary left’. The urban neighbourhood was reconceived as a new space of mobilization, with concrete and immediate issues to be addressed, where political confidence and consciousness might be developed (Craig, 1989; Lees & Mayo, 1984). These entrants brought their political ‘know-how’; tactics and organising strategies along with a participatory ethos developed not just in protest, but also increasingly via the extension of anti-authoritarian and collectivist principles into everyday life. Community activism was collective action, a participatory ‘do it yourself politics’ (Radford, 2004, p.1). As the above list of activities shows, ‘protest’ was but one part, it was also about setting up participatory ‘alternatives’, from playgrounds and advice centres to newspapers and printshops. Interest in ‘community participation’ also came from ‘top down’. Despite the growth of welfare provision, significant concentrations of both ‘deprivation’ and ‘disaffection’ in urban Britain were increasingly evident2. The political and social anxiety was that these combined ‘inner city problems’ signaled alienation from mainstream political processes, potentially bred dissent, and as such represented a threat to longer-term social stability, especially in the global context of late 1960s radical ferment (Hain, 1982). The government response was a series of policies and programmes delivered at the local level to encourage ‘self-help’ and ‘community spirit’ particularly on public housing estates. A ‘community’ dimension was incorporated into various state services and new jobs for ‘community workers’ mushroomed, along with indirect funding for semi-independent ‘community development’ projects. The intention was that ‘difficulties’ could be resolved without ‘the polarisation of conflict inherent in community action’ (Lees & Mayo, 1984, p.22). Despite some suspicion of state sponsored ‘pseudo-participation’ and of community ‘work’ as a mean to dissipate dissent, these initiatives provided activists with both political and resource opportunities including jobs and funding (Baldock, 1977). This shared axis of interest and interaction (direct and indirect) between ‘official’ initiatives and ‘grassroots’ agents — not least through the exploitation of opportunities and the struggle to define and capture the terms, content and aims of ‘community participation’— was a constitutive dimension of the dynamics of the community activist field. Feeding into and interacting with the above developments was the emergence of the ‘community arts movement’, a field in its own right. The aspirations were generally similar to those of community activism; community arts were seen as a vehicle for communication and expression by marginalised groups, and as such could play a role in effecting progressive political change (Kelly, 1984). Community artists aimed to ‘democratize their skills’ and ‘demystify’ processes, in tandem with the wider ‘movement for demystification’ involving radical lawyers, health workers, architects and planners that would characterise the field of 1970s community activism (Kenna, Medcalf & Walker, 1986, p.8). This impetus, along with the belief that participation in community arts projects could precipitate a process of ‘conscientization’ fuelled the instigation of numerous community arts media projects, from radio and video to photography and printing (Nigg & Wade, 1980). Its stress on ‘participation’ and ‘marginalised communities’ meant that funding became available. The grant-giving Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) set up a Community Arts Panel in 1974. Applications could also be made to local authorities, the community dimension fitting into policy agendas indicated above. Another significant source was the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a charity with a commitment to ‘community development’. It was as part of this varied and dynamic field of community activism, with its ‘do it yourself’ ethos, notions of ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ (both radical and ameliorative), new ideas about the role of creativity, the emergence of potential sources of economic support, and not least, community activists need for cheap access to printing, that the first community printshops came into being. With this in mind we can now turn to see some of the particular ways in which the printshops were shaped by and co-constituted this field and how they were positioned within it. Community printshops: 1968-c1980 The four community printshops introduced below, Notting Hill Press, Community Press, Union Place Resource Centre and Lenthall Road Workshop were typical in being instigated by people engaged with community activism, but often little, if any, experience of printing. Three of them had small offset-litho presses, two of them screen-printing. These relatively cheap and easy to learn (although the extent to which will discussed later) technologies were the bedrock of community printshops across the country. The time period that these brief accounts refer to coincides with the ‘dynamic’ phase of urban community activism. Notting Hill Press Notting Hill Press (NHP) was set up in 1968 by two women (Foster and Ganes) involved in the growing community activism of Notting Hill (Foster, interview, 2013). The area was rapidly emerging as a vibrant locus of autonomous and often confrontational community action through the combined input of veteran activists from the housing and anti-racist battles of the 1950s and early 1960s, countercultural radicals and a wide range of leftists politicized through the peace and the anti-Vietnam war movements. By the late 1960s, there was a network of community activist groups and an open weekly platform for local discontent, the Notting Hill People’s Association. Like most unfunded political and community groups of the time, they mostly relied on the borrowed use of basic duplicating machines which severely limited their communicative capacity. Through peace movement connections Foster and Ganes acquired an offset-litho printing press, went on a two-week training course and set up Notting Hill Press (NHP) to resolve the issue. In order to secure the press’s future, different local groups owned its assets, a safeguard for when it ran into the inevitable financial difficulties. This happened on more than one occasion (1970, c1975), but this arrangement enabled the press to ‘rise from the ashes as a phoenix for the people and the community’ (Grimes, interview, 2012). NHP was crucial to the instigation of the weekly People’s News which acted as a much needed means for sharing information amongst the various groups and with the local population at large, but also for ‘increasing the confidence of groups in their ability to present challenges to and attacks on the authorities in a clear and forceful way’ (O’Malley, 1977, p.71). Although in its first incarnation Notting Hill Press did not operate a ‘print it yourself’ policy, (that would come later with its rebirth as Crest Press in 1970), part of this confidence came from groups learning how to do their artwork, as well as the capabilities and limitations of the printing process. NHP printed for the gamut of local housing and playspace battles, claimants unions, local strikers, radical black newspapers and new alternative ventures. Connections with a ‘detached youth worker’ brought local skinheads in, who got involved for example by doing cartoons for the striking dustmen’s newsletter. Foster (interview, 2013) described the press as ‘very widely embedded, deliberately across a wide section of groups… it was seen as their press, part of the resource for a neighbourhood network.’ News of NHP spread and community activists travelled, not just across London, but also from further afield to get their newspapers printed, so scarce was this kind of resource. It inspired and supported housing activists in Manchester, who were travelling down to print their paper, to set up Moss Side Press (MSP) in 1970. MSP soon became the printer for a growing number of community papers in the north of England including Rochdale Alternative Paper, who with assistance from MSP set up another press. As Dickinson (1997, p.82), has remarked, these new ‘alternative printing facilities… provided the key’ for the proliferation of local radical newspapers across the UK in the 1970s. The next incarnation of NHP was as Crest Press (1970-c1975), whose logo of dungareed militants (one male, one female) attacking the royal crest ‘if you don’t hit it, it won’t fall!’ signaled a more explicitly radical politics for the press. Crest would incorporate printing and activists from the emergent squatting, gay liberation and women’s movements, changes indicative of the new (and shaping) influences within the community activist field. They also extended the press’s participatory ethos by encouraging people to ‘print it themselves’ (Saunders, 1974). Community Press Community Press was started in Islington, north London 1972 and came out of the locally growing squatting scene. Their following statement about the press is indicative of the radical aspiration for community activism and the role of the printshop, We see the press as a weapon in a political struggle – we want it to be used by local groups who are pushing for more control over their own lives and situations and who are fighting against the profit system and against bureaucracy… we are not a Council-sponsored ‘project’ aimed at do-gooding and participation – which means participating in a way which the Council controls us and keeps us down! (in Zeitlyn, 1975, p.50). The press’s statement is also evidence of their desire to be differentiated from the ‘top-down’ initiatives that were promoting community engagement. Nor did they want to be seen locally as ‘radical interventionists’, militants who parachuted themselves into others struggles to impose their own ‘revolutionary’ agenda (Segal, 2007, p.99). An early leaflet by the group, distributed in the area they were squatting, states, ‘One of our main objectives is to create a situation in which people do things for themselves and when we say people we include ourselves’, the ‘confidence’ to do this can ‘only be achieved through people living and working together on a day-to-day basis’ (Open Workshop, ‘Statement of ongoing activities’ 10 July 1972). Community Press became established as the production hub of a wider set of activity that included the local radical paper Islington Gutter Press, a squatter’s advice centre, an under-fives campaign and meeting space. There was a strong emphasis on people learning to ‘do it for themselves’ (Gwynn-Jones, interview, 2011). By the late 1970s they had set up a weekly ‘print training’ day for people to learn the presses, assisted by a small Arts Council grant. Until this point, their stance was that ‘we don’t do printing for people… we expect them to learn’ (in Zeitlyn 1975). The involvement with the paper, which tried to cover every local campaign as well as instigating some, meant they were well-known, with the press becoming a point of contact for a myriad range of activism. They were also in demand by ‘every left wing viewpoint under the sun’ including internationally orientated left groups, ‘Palestine, Chile, Iran, Ireland’ (Holland, interview, 2011). This was all grist to the socialist mill and the broader agenda of building of an active local left community, as well helping to pay the bills. Union Place The aim of establishing a printing facility at the heart of wider remit of community activism was shared by Union Place Resource Centre in south London, set up in 1973 by a group of artists and radical ex-community and social workers, in a pair of squatted shop-fronts. By the mid 1970s they had taken advantage of the available ‘community development’ grants from the Calouste Gulbunkian Foundation and Lambeth Council. This facilitated their broad range of activities; running a Claimants Union, producing their own radical community papers (Knuckle and Wallpaper) supplying free meeting space and cost price printing resources, going to local estates to meet residents, supporting local campaigns and tenants associations. They were also the ‘publicity arm’ of the nearby squatting scene. As Rose (interview, 2011), who joined in 1974 after involvement on a local adventure playground recalled ‘It was twofold thing, in a way it was an intervention, maybe these campaigns weren’t actually happening yet. If they weren’t, we would instigate them or encourage them to happen.’ Out of this involvement Union Press also began to publish local stories 3. Another ex-worker explained, We believed in documenting the everyday experiences of the ordinary person … so many of them never felt able to believe that people were even going to bother to listen to what they had to say… so we encouraged people to voice their opinions and express themselves politically, artistically… and for quite a lot of these people there was a very distinct change in their sense of identity, in their sense of empowerment (Williams, interview, 2011). Union Place developed connections with the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishing (FWWCP). The movement that FWWCP represented was, in large part, a consequence of community politics and the community printshops. Campaigning about the present conditions of people’s lives, along with new access to the means of print production, led to a realizable desire to also record their history. There was a parallel between the fact that the everyday quality of working class peoples lives, outside of the workplace, had not been a subject for ‘proper’ politics, and the fact that their past had not been the proper subject of history4. The impetus to redress this was ‘not out of any simple illusions about the good old days, but because the life of the past represented the investment of human energy that was to be cherished and allowed to address itself to new needs’ (Morley & Worpole, 1982, p.4). Publications were distributed in local alternative and community bookshops, and there was a demand for them. Lenthall Road Workshop Lenthall Road Workshop (LRW) was established in 1975 by three women as a community screen-printing and photography workshop in Hackney, north-east London. They did so with initial support from the nearby Centerprise, who had opened in 1971 as one of the first ‘community bookshops’ and where the above-mentioned FWWCP had been born. Similarly to Union Place, LRW took advantage of newly available funding to sustain the workshop, in this case from the new Community Arts Panel (ACGB). Far more so than the offset-litho community printshops (for example NHP and Community Press) because of their focus on poster making and photography, it was the potential of visual rather than ‘textual’ production and representation that was central to LRW. Although the women who set up the workshop emerged from squatting and housing activism, the growing Women’s Liberation Movement came to inform its emphasis and for which visual representation was of central interest. LRW was not the only ‘women’s printshop’; the desire for the WLM to control the production of its own media, had led to the instigation of a number of women-only printing workshops during the 1970s (Baines, 2012). For the women only printshops and their users, ‘mastering’ traditionally male-identified technology was perceived as both personally empowering and a step towards dismantling limiting constructions of gender, and as such collectively empowering (Cadman, Chester & Pivot, 1981). The politics of the Women’s Liberation Movement fed into the ‘mixed’ community printshops too, from the collective refusal to print sexist material, to the shared childcare arrangements of Union Place (Rose, interview, 2011) and the involvement of Community Press and Paddington Printshop in setting up women centres (Segal, 1980, Phillips, 2005). LRW worked with and taught screen-printing and photography to the now usual wide range of community, left and social movement groups and cultural projects; from nursery campaigns and radical midwives to squatters and anti-fascists. The workshop also soon became a creative social space for feminists to make political posters together and learn to print in a women-only environment. In 1977 LRW set up the Hackney Girls Project, an alternative youth club that ran for several years. According to Moan (personal communication, 2012), ‘at that time and place youth clubs were rough as guts and dominated by young men. Many parents would not let their daughters go to them at all. So we attracted a lot of young women… and really opened their eyes…’ Later LRW would collaborate with feminist social workers to set up workshops for women who were at ‘crisis points in their life’ (Pollard, interview, 2011). LRW saw these projects as part of their role in developing a supportive resource in which people ‘who did not have much of a voice’ in ‘public life’, including themselves, could use print to create their own images and messages, and be ‘empowered’ through doing so. The above ‘snapshots’ of these four distinct workshops reveal some of the ways in which community printshops participated in the ongoing development of the community activist and the women’s liberation movement fields. Their extended activities contributed to that crucial dimension of activism, ‘movement building’; from ‘consciousness raising’, information sharing, building networks, growing new groups and adherents to co-developing resonant symbolic forms. The necessary precondition of this activity was what Bourdieu (1996) terms ‘illusio’, by which he means the collective ‘belief’ in the worth of the field and its stakes. This belief or ‘illusio’ forms the ongoing basis for the existence and functioning of all social fields. The struggles (internally and with other fields), the development of discourses and practices, of symbolic forms, resources, of an internal culture and ‘a history’, all contribute to sustaining ‘illusio’. The concrete existence of the printshops, the flow of groups that used them, of media generated, of knowledge shared, were arguably tangible illusio-sustaining evidence of a movement. Significant parts of the wider field of (leftist) contention shared key aspects of the same illusio: that radical social change was possible and that it would come from ‘the grassroots’. By the early 1980s, if not earlier this ‘belief’ had considerably waned. Lent (2001) has characterised the broader 1980s social movement field as one whereby much of the radicalism of the 1970s gave way to ‘institutionalisation and professionalisation’. However, many community printshops continued well into the 1980s, including three of those described above. I now want to turn to their survival in the related contexts of the decline of community activism and the changing wider field of leftist contention, firstly setting out those developments, then focusing on the printshops themselves. After community activism: changes and challenges By the end the 1970s, the dynamic period of urban ‘community action’ was mostly over (Waddington, 2008). In the tenth anniversary edition of Islington Gutter Press, this demise is explained as follows, The space for grassroots activity [had disappeared], as the confidence of campaigning groups faded with successive defeats, and the ever more vicious reality of a confident Tory government under Thatcher. Many former activists who did not lapse into cynical despair, retreated into the Labour party… to abandon former dreams of self-organisation and active campaigning politics (Islington Gutter Press, 1982 no.93, 7). Thatcher’s election victory (1979) had come as a demoralizing blow to many on the left who had believed that the ‘intense socialist agitation’ of the preceding years was evidence of changing ‘mass’ consciousness (see Rowbottom, Segal & Wainwright, 1980). The always double-edged discourse of ‘self-help’ was also, as Stuart Hall amongst others have noted, well and truly captured by the new Conservative government’s rhetoric and policies. However, although the period between the late 1970s and early 1980s can be characterised as one in which the earlier optimism for mass social change had begun to wane (Lent, 2001) it was also one of widespread left oppositional activity. For a while, Thatcher’s new right economic policies and welfare and trade union dismantling boosted campaigning activity and offered the left a clear and identifiable enemy to rally against. As one of the workers at Lenthall Road Workshop said, ‘Even though it was Thatcher’s time, I thought we were thriving… I also remember feeling very enabled somehow by the numbers of groups that had the same kind of desires… somehow the backlash of movements was very strong’ (Johnson, interview, 2011). New mass protest movements also emerged or revived, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Anti-Apartheid Movement both spawning groups all over the country, as did the ‘era defining’ 1984-5 strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). All this activity generated print needs, much of which was serviced by the alternative print workshops, including the community printshops. The survival of some of the London community printshops into the 1980s was it might be argued, an effect of the failure of radical community politics. As Waddington (2008) and other have noted, ‘radical’ community activism began by fighting the welfare state but already by 1974, was also put in a position of having to defend it against central government cuts. The next move was going to work within it; the late 1970s and early 80s were marked by the increasing flow of ex-radicals into the Labour party and local government (Lansley et al., 1989). Various factors had facilitated this apparent change of heart towards traditional political structures. As the above Islington Gutter Press article states, the demise of radical community activism had led some in this direction. Lent (2001, p.168) has noted a decline in ‘mass’ active support for other social movements by this time. The Labour party was also changing; the left of the party become more influential and it sought to connect with the various strands of ‘extra parliamentary activity’ to reinvigorate its approach. Significantly, local government, once seen by the Labour left as marginal to the proper business of politics (and mostly abandoned to the right and centrist elements that community activists battled) was reconceived as a powerful base from which to conduct opposition to Thatcher’s government (Egan, 2006). The effect of this reconfigured field of local government was the revival of ‘municipal socialism’ in the early 1980s, and a series of policies, sub-committees and financial support relating to some of the activity community activists, social movements and the non-aligned left had otherwise been autonomously pursuing. The GLC (Greater London Council) under ‘radical Labourite’ Ken Livingstone, with its huge budget was the flagship. The ‘new left’ Labour councils also used their resources to campaign against the Conservative government’s policies and support other groups that were doing so. Again this directly or indirectly generated a vast amount of print, some of which went through the community printshops. The influx of ‘ex-radicals’ into the Labour Party and local government brought an ideological commitment to co-operatives, which fed into the local economic strategies of some of the new left local authorities (Gyford, 1985) leading to various kinds of support, from the funding of Co-operative Development Agencies, ‘community accounting’ courses and ‘soft’ loans. The GLC, in particular also developed cultural policies that were informed by a populist conception of the arts including the need to use them for political purposes, aiding a thriving ‘alternative’ arts scene (Bianchini, 1987) and support for community arts projects. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s there was also a growth in London of purely ‘service’ left printing co-operatives, some taking advantage of the newly favourable climate of ‘swinging left London’ created by municipal socialism (Pennington, interview, 2011; Swash, interview, 2011). They were for the most part though born of an increasing awareness of the need for a straightforward printing service for political and campaigning movements — along with a lowering of expectation with regard to the ‘social processes’ that the operations of a printshop could engender (Marshall, 1983; Williams, interview, 2011). Community Press took this road. As with other community printshops, their users and networks had always extended beyond the immediate field of community activism as such provided a reason, and a bare means, to continue. Financially it was difficult, and they were in competition with the new crop of service printing co-ops. The small grant they had received from the Arts Council dried up in the early 1980s. Although they still showed people how to produce their artwork, groups no longer learnt to print. They tried to become more ‘business-like’. This adjustment of ambition and practices, along with a (relatively) more formalised approach was reflected in other areas of the radical community activist field, such as the creation of housing co-operatives by squatters. Other initiatives became charities with management committees or incorporated into state services, all adding to a growing ‘voluntary sector’, increasingly peopled by many with ‘left’ sympathies (Hilton et al., 2012). To some extent this added to the ‘market’ that had been expanded by left-Labour council funding (Swash, interview, 2011). Those involved shared similar political backgrounds, often ‘felt at home’ using the community and co-operative printers and wanted to support them (Elston, Harrison & Whitbread, 1983). However they increasingly also wanted a more ‘professional’ service. To survive in this changing context, Community Press felt they had to ‘try and smarten up a bit’ (Millet, interview, 2013). One of their advertisements from the time simply states, ‘Community Press: Quality Printing, Competitive Prices’. They did not succeed and in 1987 amalgamated with one of the newer generation of printing co-ops, Trojan Press. Union Place continued until the early 1990s. This was made financially possible through a grant from the local Labour council. However, corresponding with general atrophying of the community activist field, Union Place’s ‘interventionist’ involvement in this area had ceased by the early 1980s. Local connections diminished too as the last of ‘70s style community activists’ moved on. The appraisal of community activism by the mid 1980s collective is telling, Community politics has proved to be inadequate for its role of mediating between grassroots groups and the abstract but no less effective social forces set in motion by the capitalist system. [It] has proved to be useless in defending various communities from these forces (in Kenna, Medcalf & Walker, 1986 p.22). Despite this loss of ‘illusio’, throughout the 1980s the press provided a resource for noncontentious council-funded community groups, along with an ongoing range of left activity, from industrial action to ‘troops out of Ireland’ and local squatting advice groups. They remained committed to showing groups how to do their artwork but no longer considered it viable for them to learn printing, and found people uninterested in doing so (Tompsett, interview, 2011). They had ‘a sort of renaissance’ in the late 1980s by introducing desktop publishing facilities. This brought a new wave of local people in, although it served more as free training for potential employment rather than something to be mobilised in the service of political empowerment (Swingler, interview, 2011). By the mid 1990s, although they still received a small amount of funding from the local council, the dwindling user base, lack of new people willing to get involved along with a series of breaks ins, led to a decision to finally close. Lenthall Road Workshop (LRW) also survived the 1980s; supported through continuing, albeit diminishing, grant aid. Their ongoing participation in the field of feminist activity signaled a rather different trajectory to the other presses. They continued to print with a mixture of women’s, community and campaigning groups, run the Girls Project and participate in local festivals at least until the late 1980s. In the first half of the decade they also became a resource for the emergent Black Women’s Movement in London. Connections with Outwrite women’s newspaper, new black women’s centres, projects and conferences, as well as the black arts scene, (some of which was benefitting from the newly available funding), meant that LRW continued to be a space for women to get together, make posters, teach other how to print and do photography. This all began to fade for a variety of reasons. New workers with different interests and commitments were one. The curtail of the municipal socialist experiment and its funding for projects like LRW and many of those that used them was another. A final and fairly crucial factor was that the demand by groups for screen-printed posters had vanished (Bruce, interview, 2011). LRW eventually closed around the same time as Union Place. The decline of community activism and changes in the wider field of leftist contention in1980s London through transformations in the field of local government; developments in the field of feminist activity, the funding, institutionalisation and professionalisation of areas of movement activity; the hostile political climate of Thatcherism and a general waning of the ‘collective effervescence’ that had generated the field of community activism and its printshops in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as we can see reshaped them in different ways. The amateur, anti-professional, ‘diy spirit’ that had characterised the fields of urban community activism and the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, did not necessarily resonate with some of these changes. It is to this once pervasive aspect of the community printshops aspirations and practices that I finally turn to. As the 1986 exhibition catalogue Printing is Easy…? Community Printshops 1970-1986 makes apparent, the notion that ‘printing it yourself’ could be empowering had been dispelled in many workshops. In their survey of over thirty community printshops across Britain, the authors found that ‘several of the longest-established and best-known printshops had abandoned the open-access DIY philosophy… that they themselves had done so much to popularise’ (Kenna, Medcalf & Walker, 1986, p.7). Contributions from individual workshops described the ‘diy’ system as ‘punitive’, ‘discriminatory’, ‘patronising’, ‘ a subtle form of oppression’ where people were coerced into doing things ‘for their own good’, and that it denied the process of skill acquisition and devalued skills per se. For some this latter point had always been a tension, given that printing was conventionally a working class trade (Worpole, 1978; Green, interview, 2011). The notion that ‘printing was easy’ and therefore we could do it for ourselves had been part of a broader discourse and set of practices that informed both the community activist field and the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement field. It was related to the desire to de-bunk and share ‘specialised’ knowledge in order that we might start to, collectively, ‘take control of our lives’. The twin repressive forces preventing this were the ever-encroaching tentacles of capital and state. Doing it ourselves, from pregnancy testing to squatting, was often expressed as the concrete everyday application of the principle of ‘taking control’ of one’s life and of bypassing the system where necessary/possible. In 1974, Zeitlyn who joined Inter-Action, a community arts project in London, issued the first of several Print: How You Can Do It manuals. These manuals were initially heavily supplemented with the case for why we should be ‘doing it ourselves’, specifically pitting the ‘active producer’ against the ‘passive consumer’. Printing it yourself allowed you to move from one position to the other. As an LRW worker explained ‘once you start seeing yourself as someone who can do things, then you are in a position to take control of your life’ (Somewhere in Hackney, 1980). However printing was not that easy, especially small offset-litho. Neither was screen-printing, if you wanted to do it well. The left in Britain, with the exception of a resistance to ‘slickness’, had not taken design and aesthetics particularly seriously, and poorly designed and printed media was common. This attitude would start changing in the 1980s, not just as an effect of institutionalisation and ‘professionalisation’, but also through the influence of new entrants into left and social movement fields, for whom the amateurish aesthetics of the 1970s spoke of a political generation that had their day, and failed (Robinson, interview, 2011). Tied into the expanding field of consumer and promotional culture, there was also a growth of ‘design consciousness’ in the 1980s (Crowley 2004). Even parts of the ‘old left’ began to recognise that a new generation ‘could be reached through their pleasure in consumption’ (Phillips, 2007, p.56). Magazines such as Marxism Today, New Socialist and New Statesman began to overhaul their design, (some with the help of Neville Brody, one of the gurus of the ‘designer decade’), contributing to the phenomena of ‘designer socialism’. The ‘diy’ ethos had by no means disappeared in this period; it found particular form in the various peace camps of the 1980s, the post-punk ‘zine explosion’ and the anarcho-squatting scene. However, the prime tool for its application to media practices was now the photocopier; an imminently more accessible technology, in terms of operation, than both small offset-litho and screen-printing. Photocopying gradually became more widely available in the 1980s, especially with the rise of commercial ‘instant print’ shops. Some of the smallscale leaflets and newsletters that had once been the province of places like Community Press began to go through these shops (Millet, interview, 2013). In 1983, with financial support from the Greater London Council, Community CopyArt, a collectively run, open access ‘instant printshop’ appeared in London. They provided a resource for both campaigning groups and artists for whom the photocopier had emerged as creative tool, the two often coming together. They were a one-off, there was no spread of similar resources in London and despite their lone status CopyArt found it ‘hard work getting people to find out about us’ (in Kenna, Medcalf & Walker, 1986, p.65). By the early 1990s, they had also become a casualty of the Conservative government’s clampdown on municipal socialist spending. Conclusion The community printshops were conceived as ‘resources’ for the cultivation of urban community activism. The cases discussed have shown how this could far exceed the provision of amenable print services for local activists. The media output they made possible, from protest placards, to corruption-exposing community newspapers, ‘diy’ welfare rights and squatting manuals, working class autobiographies, anti-deportation, feminist and festival posters — to give but a few examples — were also part of creating the culture of the diverse field of community activism. This was not just in terms of useful and salient symbolic forms, but also the practices that co-generated them: practices consistent with the ‘diy’ and collectivist values of the field. As Calhoun explains, ‘[h]istorically fields represent successful claims to distinctive kinds of value and to distinctive capacity to provide that value’ (Calhoun, 2013, p.50). These particular values were not just those of the community activist field, for a period they suffused a wider field of leftist contention. As discussed earlier in the chapter, those values were gradually undermined as the 1980s wore on and although the support occasioned by the movement of ex-radicals into the field of institutional politics may have prolonged the printshops survival it also partially served to undermine their distinctive value. In the context of institutional approval ‘doing it ourselves’ somewhat loses it political meaning. 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Shaw (eds) Community Development In Theory And Practice: An International Reader Nottingham: Spokesman Williams, P. (2011) Interview with author Zeitlyn, J. (1974, 1975, 1980) Print: How You Can Do It Yourself London: Inter-Action 1 There has been no published historical overview of community activism in the UK. At the time of writing, David Ellis (York University) is working to address this with his doctoral thesis, Pavement Politics: Community Action in Urban Britain, 1968-1987 2 These reports included: Abel-Smith, B & Townsend, P (1965) The Poorest and The Poor. London: Bell; Lynes, A (1963) National Assistance and National Prosperity, Occasional papers in Social Administration, No.5, Welwyn: Codicote Press; Milner Holland (1965) Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London, London: HMSO; Central Advisory Committee for Education Plowden Report (1967) Children and their Primary Schools London: HMSO 3 Examples of Union Place’s local publishing included: Nelson, J (1978) No More Walls London: Union Place Community Resource Centre; (1976) Nine Days 1926: the General Strike in Southwark. London: Dustbin Press; (1976) As Things Are: Women, Work and Family in South London. London: Bonfire Press 4 Although there were important forerunners to the worker writers movement such as the History Workshop, founded in the late 1960s by Raphael Samuel. See http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk