Bristol Radical
History Group

BRHG are delighted to announce the 7th Bristol Radical History Festival in M Shed (Saturday 26 April) and at the Cube microplex (Sunday 27 April), with a special film showing of the 'London Recruits' at the Watershed on the Saturday night. Themes for this year include radical histories of housing, incarceration and Bristol's counter-culture, along with contributions throughout from our visitors the East Wall History group from Dublin, Ireland.

The parish of Stapleton was once home to soldiers and sailors who were interned in Stapleton Prison as prisoners of war during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This is the story of the Misérables of Bristol.

Colin Thomas’s short history charts the reception given to those fleeing war and persecution from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, outlines the stories of organisations that have developed to support these refugees in Bristol and, finally, poses some difficult questions we have to ask.

City of Swimmers is a verrucas-and-all history of swimming in Bristol, from the eighteenth-century Rennison’s Baths in Montpelier to the beautiful historic Jacob’s Wells and Bristol South baths, and the mostly overlooked pools in more recent leisure centres.