Following the Chartists around London with the British Library
On Monday, 21 September, Dr Alex Buchanan from the History Department participated in a historical tour of the sites of Chartist meetings in 1830s and 1840s London. Organised in conjunction with the British Library Labs, the event culminated in the re-enactment of a meeting in the upper room of a pub, at which Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor was presented with a pair of green silk stockings by the Chartist women of St Pancras.
As an archivist and architectural historian, I am always interested in the intersection between buildings and events, and how historical records can help us to link the two. It is amazing to see how many of today’s pubs stand on the same site and maintain the same names as pubs used for Chartist meetings, something I’ve also discovered in relation to my own research on nineteenth-century stonemasons.
- Dr Alex Buchanan