Culture

There are a couple of vehicles regularly parked down our street which always raise my eyebrows. Firstly, because they park with their kerbside wheels wholly on the pavement and I have to walk in the road because I can’t squeeze past, and secondly, because of their names.

The Land Rover model is a ‘Defender’ and the camper-van is a ‘Trident’. There are other less offensive Land Rover model names such as ‘Discovery’ and ‘Freelander’ and even the mysterious ‘Evoque’ but these two…

Human beings are social creatures and the effects of loneliness are deeply harmful to us, to our health and our mental state. We are inclined towards altruism and community but an obsession with individualism is driving us into isolation. And this separation can be useful to those in power: a community of people working together is not so easy to control as a fragmented society of apparently disparate individuals.

George Monbiot believes that loneliness has become an epidemic and…

Sarah Gittins writes:

Since 2013 I have been working with Jonathan Baxter on an art and horticulture project called DUO (Dundee Urban Orchard). DUO has worked alongside community groups, schools and cultural organisations to establish a network of 25 small-scale orchards that together re-imagine Dundee as an Orchard City. During this time I have also drawn an old…

In common with most people seeking positive change in the world, I have been struggling these past few months to keep hopeful about humanity. It feels very overwhelming and disempowering to hear the news every day. But there are always small things that can help us to keep on keeping on.

As the New Year turned, I turned to Pete Seeger to help me re-find some of my optimism and hope. And he did not let me down. So I would…

When we sing, we vibrate – that’s how we make sound, it’s a bit like having two little guitar strings in our throats that are amplified by the whole of our bodies. So when we sing together, we vibrate together. There’s no avoiding it, if you’re in the room with a group of singers, you will feel the vibrations in your body in some way. And if you sing as well, you will feel your own vibrations mixed in with other people’s vibrations. There’s no way to vibrate collectively alone. It’s one of…

In 1979, Conservative central office received a fawning letter requesting a high-quality photo of the then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Unbeknownst to those who duly sent it, the black and white photograph was incorporated in the poster shown opposite.

In one simple image, Thatcher’s political duplicity towards women had been laid bare for all to see. This image, titled Tough! is just one of the many familiar posters created by the See Red Women’s Workshop, a…

We rise, for our brothers, for our sisters.
We rise, for water, for life.
We rise, for one nation.
Protect our water,
Protect our land,
Protect our people.

[Mass chanting at Standing Rock Spirit Camp, led by a young Sioux woman]

The Dakota pipeline is being planned and constructed to pipe oil from the Dakotas to Illinois, in the USA. The Standing Rock Sioux and other First Nations of the…

We had arranged to meet up at the Manhattan Gourmet Restaurant [in New York city], a glorified deli at 57th and 6th, right above the F Train station, with the Chase bank looming across the avenue. We carried our toad heads in a big sack.

It was a working-class place with a lunch crowd shouting their orders, lots of laughter. The folks were service workers, spiffily dressed…

Many of you will know this song, 'Singing For Our Lives', by Holly Near. It has been sung in many contexts since she wrote it, but it began life as a cry for and from members of the global LGBT community in response to the killing of councillor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone in San Francisco in 1978.

There are songs that we inherit as radical activists, songs that are part of our history. I cut my teeth singing this song outside Faslane submarine base, and on all sorts of…

It is 2041 and atmospheric CO2 levels have passed 600 parts per million, leading to the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and a three-metre rise in sea levels. Florida is underwater and world population has passed 10 billion. A few billion are stateless refugees. ‘A few billion more [are] indentured or imprisoned.’

Every cultivated acre on Earth is planted with sterile genetically-engineered varieties whose terminator genes have been implanted to protect corporate profits…

If you don’t live in Scotland, you might not know the phrase, ‘the carrying stream’. It has come to mean being part of the passing on of tradition, particularly through music and culture, and comes from the words of Hamish Henderson. Hamish was, among many other things, a great Scottish songwriter, collector and passer on of traditional songs. His final words, taken from the elegy he wrote for himself, is where this phrase ‘the carrying stream’ comes from;

‘Maker, ye maun sing…

This linocut print shows a table of people gathered to make origami cranes. They are located within a landscape derived from pictures of the area around Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945. The cranes relate to the story behind the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima.

The monument shows a Japanese girl called Sadako holding up a crane. Sadako died from leukaemia as a result of radiation from the bomb. While she was in hospital, she set about making…

In 2003, my husband Chris and I moved to the Eirene Centre, a retreat centre in Northamptonshire run by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It was a huge change in lifestyle. After 15 years in paid work, I swapped a busy office for full-time motherhood. We moved from a terraced house in a large town to a detached building surrounded by fields about a mile away from the US airbase at Molesworth. As the leftie Christian pacifist incomers, living in the last but one property in the village, we…

A new space, ‘The Vaults’, has opened in the basement of Housmans Bookshop at 5 Caledonian Road, London.

Partly funded by an online crowdfunding campaign, the Vaults had a launch party on 3 December. Visitors will find an expanded selection of fiction, poetry, graphic novels, art and art theory titles, childrens’ books, and more. Upstairs, the shop’s core political stock has also grown, with newly-expanded sections for black politics and anti-racism, health and disability politics…

I wonder how many BBC listeners and viewers are aware of the corporation’s motto and that this venerable and vulnerable institution has a coat of arms? This is not a pedantic and pointless question but one which, I insist, is important and relevant.

As a child of the Radio Age, and coming from a Old Labourite family, I grew up with inborn belief in mutualism and co-operativism and utter disdain for the reductionist view that the only worthwhile engine of human behaviour is profit…