The Radical Brighton project started in the summer of 2016 as a means of preserving a perishable archive of grassroots publications created in the sixties, seventies and eighties in the UK, including Brighton.
Handmade zine-y publications, these are time capsules of those youth generations who leave us a primary resource of formative democratic and countercultural movements. This collection of local papers is among the first examples of subcultures speaking to themselves and they share their diaries, calendars, illustrations, poetry and much more.
To access the digitised papers, browse by Tags which are on the homepage and embedded in each post. Bibliographic information about each item is at the top of each post. This project also documents the process of creating an archive of local press which you can read about by looking at the ‘documentation’ Tag. The papers are released in stages, the first book to be scanned was Alternative Brighton (1973) and the first run of titles to be scanned will be Librarians for Social Change.
A significant resource for this digitisation project is the collection created by John Spiers, founder of Brighton-based Harvester Press. In the early 90s Harvester microfilmed a selection of issues from 132 local press publications and released these as The Underground and Alternative Press in Britain. This collection is being digitised for the first time by the St. Peters House Library preserving an important but perishable material archive.
Titles in the Underground Press Collection on microform at the St. Peters House Library (Credit for listing the titles : Josef Cabey)
The Underground and Alternative Press in Britain: a Bibliographical Guide with historical notes / John Spiers
Anyone who seeks to understand how people started to live self-chosen lives and create their own spaces and community in the UK will require access to these papers.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.