This Guardian article from 2015 outlines a walking tour of key sites of Manchester’s radical history. This of course includes ‘Peterloo’ in 1819 where sword-wielding cavalry charged into a defenceless crowd who had gathered to call for parliamentary reform, leaving 15 dead and more than 600 injured. Several of the speakers were also involved in the fight to abolish slavery, one of a number of parallels in Manchester’s history. “It was the largest crowd ever gathered at that point in British history,” says radical historian Michael Herbert. “The sight of the British army attacking its own people was unusual, almost unprecedented. It was a really shocking event with reverberations that went on throughout the nineteenth century.”
Those reverberations can still be felt and echoes of Peterloo can be heard today. As Herbert has said more recently, the event: “was about political reform as a response to hunger, unemployment and poverty, which has inescapable parallels with food bank Britain in 2017.” Peterloo has been described elsewhere as “a war on the emerging working class movement”.
With Peterloo’s 200th Anniversary coming up on 16 August 2019, this walking tour would be a good way to familiarise yourself with Manchester’s history of political protest and campaigning for economic and social justice. An extra stop to find out more about Peterloo and other significant events would be the People’s History Museum (on the map on Bridge Street to the West of point D).
