pasttense

#OnThisDay in London's musical history, 1980: The Greater London Council orders a halt to the plans of American punk-destructo band, the Plasmatics, to blow up a car onstage tonight.

It’s Lammas Day! In the traditional rural calendar, Lammas Day signalled the annual shift from planting crops to grazing animals. It was the last day on which grass was cut for hay, and the day grazing could commence and the hunting season began. ‘The Glorious Twelfth’ – the first day for shooting grouse – is in fact Lammas Day, pushed eleven days back by the UK’s transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian in 1752. The right to cut hay and graze animals on certain fields extended to all parishioners, rich or poor. Such fields were known as Lammas land. Their use belonged to everyone, ‘without regard to tenement’  – meaning you didn’t have to be relatively well-off house-owner to have Lammas Rights. If this existed by long-established tradition, it was often a tradition that had to be enforced collectively, when the rich and powerful attempted to take possession of land, fence it off, exploit it commercially, etc. Lammas Day was thus also a day when battles around enclosure often took place, as the ritual significance of the day was a central part of the rural year, and the ritual opening up of land for grazing was a useful arena for protest around loss of access. August 1st often became a focus for action when common rights/customs were threatened; an annual ritual #OnThisDay in London radical history, 1592: enclosure fences destroyed, Westminster https://wp.me/p74yfw-Hp Another Lammas Day anti enclosure action: Leyton Marsh 1892 Resisting enclosure past & present: East London Waterworks, Leyton Marsh, and the Leyton Lammas lands https://wp.me/p74yfw-XN

#OnThisDay in lesbian herstory: the first Lesbian Strength march took place in London, 1981.

#OnThisDay in London's radical history, 1801: a mini-riot in Wych St (Aldwych), as a crowd attack a house where surgeons are dissecting bodies.
Corpses of executed criminals were handed over for dissection; friends of the deceased often fought for them to be buried without being dismembered

For more on the battle between medical establishment and the 'mob' over the bodies of the hanged, see:
https://wp.me/p74yfw-iT

#OnThisDay in London's radical history: Police kill Blair Peach during anti-fascist demo, Southall, 1979.
https://wp.me/p74yfw-7l

Blair’s partner Celia Stubbs has campaigned for years to get justice & expose police actions: as a result she was targeted by #spycops
Her statement to the Public Inquiry into Undercover Policing:
https://www.ucpi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/UCPI0000034309.pdf