The idea of having a permanent space in Partick, or anywhere else in Glasgow, for us to own and make our own, feels very far away. But in decades gone by it wouldn’t have been unusual. Women’s centres, unemployed workers’ centres, radical bookshops, lesbian and gay centres, and social clubs made up a rich landscape of the left—not only in Glasgow, but across Scotland and the rest of Britain. These spaces gave groups a place to meet, organise and plan, while leaving room for moments of care and reprieve, like debriefing over a cup of tea or meeting new friends and comrades for the first time. Across the left, there is a recognition that there’s a dearth of physical spaces compared to what once was. Women’s centres, affiliated with the national Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), existed in most cities in 1980s Britain. At their peak in the mid-1980s, there were 250 unemployed workers’ centres across Britain and Northern Ireland. The Federation of Radical Booksellers mapped out over 100 radical bookshops across Britain in 1984.1 The map of physical spaces for the left to use today could not be more different.
This article offers some thoughts as to why that is, and what and how we should consider rebuilding. Many of the kinds of spaces mentioned closed with not a bang but a whimper. While evictions and confrontations marked the end of some spaces, others slowly wound down as staff left, groups moved on, and premises became untenable to maintain. For those of us invested in rebuilding permanent spaces on the left, these stories are worth examining with sober senses regarding what lessons they offer. The emotional and material histories of those spaces offer important lessons as to how we might construct present-day cultures of organising, beyond the bread-and-butter tools that we need to open a premises. We should carefully examine exactly what is involved in establishing and maintaining left-wing spaces and what we might be doing it for.2
On what we’re up against
George Kirkpatrick was the coordinator of the unemployed workers’ centre in Drumchapel, Glasgow in the 1980s. Unemployed workers’ centres were trade union initiatives established to address rising rates of unemployment. Like other centre coordinators across Scotland, George was tasked with running a space that kept unemployed people connected with their local community and their trade union. The committee of each centre had a representative function, that included at least one unemployed worker seat that would oversee the work of the centre, feeding that back into the local council and regional authority respectively. But the conditions those involved in the centre were working under were far from easy. George told me, “During the Thatcher years… we were under attack so, it wasn’t about advancing workers’ rights really. In the 80’s it was more about defending.”3
Many left-wing spaces emerged in this context—from crises. Upon Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979, her Conservative Government quickly acted upon their previous weaponisation of the notion of the “seventies crisis” that had delivered them election success. The trade union movement was consequently a key target, as the mythology of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1978–9—where trade unions had taken regular industrial action—loomed large in the political arena. Between 1980 and 1993, there were six Acts of Parliament that significantly hindered the ability of trade unions to undertake lawful industrial action. Across this legislation, the terms on which trade unions could demonstrate industrial action were also targeted, such as through making secondary picketing unlawful and aiming to eliminate large scale pickets. The repression of trade unions not only as vehicles of industrial struggle, but also as a powerful political force, had drastic and damaging long-term effects. In 1979, 13.3 million people belonged to trade unions, with 85 percent of the working population covered by collective pay setting mechanisms. By 2001, union membership had declined by 40 percent and the number of workers protected by those same collective pay agreements was under 35 percent.4
As forms of organising shifted in response to the nature of what the left was up against, the broader political and geographical picture factored into this too. In Scotland, a number of key industrial employers closed their Scottish plants against concerted trade union resistance. George would talk about the housing scheme in Drumchapel looking like a ‘desert wi windaes’, indicative of the broader impacts of deindustrialisation. Unemployed workers centres were spaces of organising, but they also functioned to serve communities that had otherwise been abandoned. The question that we might draw out from this is: what and who would we want our spaces to be for? Women’s centres and unemployed workers’ centres sat at the intersection of both political and welfare functions. Lesbian and gay centres and bookshops held political meetings and material, while being linked up to befriending services, new helplines and later, AIDS crisis advocacy services. Both offered room for campaigning and strategising, while simultaneously giving people advice on housing and new benefits entitlements. There was a dual function to these sites that sought to politicise the structural cause of problems that people faced, while concurrently offering day-to-day support with the fallout—and that often shaped where these spaces were based.
Where would we place our new spaces today? The political and economic crises that envelop the left today manifest in a different way, with a throughline that can be traced back to the very same context George and others were organising in. The contemporary fractures of neoliberalism may find some of their roots in the 1970s and 1980s but ultimately demand a different strategy that should shape our response. The endemic precarity of work and housing, in sectors ranging from hospitality to offshore energy work, to the university sector, challenges our attempts to build enduring industrial bases. We lose some of the best area reps, shop stewards, and lay members to the turnover of casualised work. Where networks between workplace unions exist, some of those relationships may maintain. There may be something worthwhile about enshrining those informal networks in regular movement space to organise, based around those same problems that permeate a range of workplaces. The ascent of tenant and community unions has offered a vital complement to this, though from within we face the same challenges of insecurity. When one branch member is evicted, the muscle of the union is disrupted. Branch strength can eerily mirror the patterns of housing displacement, where rents dictate our personal and political lives.
For those of us in ironically named ‘office jobs’, we are increasingly less likely to be geographically close to our workplaces, if a physical workplace exists at all. The proliferation of remote working and self-employed ‘side hustles’ has presented new challenges (and new opportunities) for workplace and trade union organising. It is difficult to envision that a space outside the workplace might be able to connect us with the trade union movement, or at the intersection of workplace and community organising, when we increasingly work with people who live cities away from us. With broader social movements, both interspersed through and independent of the workplace and our homes, similar questions arise regarding how to spatially organise around issues such as race, gender, sexuality, migration status and disability, among many others. We need to be clear about what existing or new constituencies any space would serve, with honesty about the limitations that we face.
On the work of building space
In Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, Erin Pizzey writes about the beginnings of Women’s Aid refuges in Britain in 1971. On the first page, she details how the first group of women in Chiswick managed to secure their first premises: “I wrote several letters to the local council, got the support of one of the local papers… and soon the Borough of Hounslow gave us the keys of a small house in Belmont Terrace. The house had been derelict for six years and was due to be demolished.”5 Pizzey writes of a situation many of us have never experienced and will never experience. Where I live in Glasgow, as in other major cities, it would now be far more lucrative for the council to bet on the speculative property value of any premises than to let any grassroots group have the keys, no matter how dilapidated the building was. Across conversations with people I spoke to as part of my research, this story was familiar throughout the early to mid-seventies. Many of the women I interviewed about the original women’s centre on Miller Street in Glasgow couldn’t remember how they acquired the premises. They thought someone might have accessed the room(s) through a council scheme, where cheap rent supported similar projects. The subjectivity of oral history notwithstanding, rent and acquiring a premises was not identified as a core barrier—a far cry from how many on the left would talk about efforts to open a premises now.
However, soon these examples would become exceptional. In 1977, the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG) released the agenda for their eighth Annual General Meeting (AGM). It included a report from each of their ten branches, north to south, on the work and activities they’d completed over the past year. One of the SMG’s stated aims was to establish lesbian and gay centres in every city or locality that the group was based in. For many groups, this was a struggle. In Aberdeen, group members admitted that they had struggled to find a premises to buy and renovate, among all the other activities they had committed themselves to. They noted that “the major danger is that we slip back into lethargy: to prevent this we need all the encouragement, advice, and support we can obtain from our friends.”6 Similarly, the group in Cumbria and the Borders wrote in their report to the AGM that they had had to leave the pub they were using for meetings, as the landlord was not happy with the poor turnout, and therefore limited food and drink sales. They lamented that “in Cumbria & the Borders, we’ve had our ups and downs, we’re enjoying a down at present, yes!—Happy in the knowledge that the next will be an up! It HAS [sic] to be, the alternative cannot be contemplated.”7
Building and maintaining a space takes work, money, and resources. It also takes a level of emotional commitment that is difficult to properly account for in appraisals of how we might emulate these projects today. When I asked Keith Stoddart, coordinator of Govan unemployed workers’ centre in the 1980s, about the closure of the space, he told me that one of the main reasons was that it just “died, it ran out of money, it ran out of steam.” Emotional and material resources were part of the same conversation, varying as to which of the two categories were easier to source. There was a sense that those involved in spaces like Lavender Menace (Scotland’s first lesbian and gay bookshop) should be propelled along by the political vision, with factors such as money and capital as something to negotiate at different points along the way, with the sobering recognition that this was difficult to maintain. Lavender Menace in Forth Street Edinburgh opened in 1982. It remained in the same location, with the same name, until 1986 when it moved to Dundas Street and became West and Wilde. Speaking to the founders, Bob Orr (and his partner Raymond Rose) and Sigrid Nielsen, they reckoned with the compromises that they made along the way to keep the shop open, in whatever form they could. Raymond told me that “commercialism, is what gives you the energy to [keep going] … not the energy that’s the wrong word … I don’t want to say energy because your energy is political.”8 Speaking to Greg Michaelson, who organised and volunteered in a number of radical bookshops in Edinburgh told me, “I think there was probably, there was burnout as well. You know, you can’t go on doing this open-endedly, just when you’re starting something up it’s really exciting. When you’re running it, it becomes a grind.”9
That grind, the less glamourous parts of running a space, did not have a long list of people lining up to volunteer. While deep political commitments might spark a person’s initial involvement in a particular space, this was not enough on its own. The First of May was a radical bookshop in Niddry Street in Edinburgh’s city centre that was run as a workers cooperative and operated a volunteer rota for staffing. At various intervals, the bookshop volunteers and workers spoke of poor conditions, low profits and the precarious existence of these spaces contributing to a general sense of exhaustion. In a newsletter from 1977 they write that “very recently it’s been gloomy; not [sic] point trying to hide this. The main reasons have been a fall-off in sales and near-crisis with filling the rota for staffing the shop… more and more work has been carried by fewer people.”10 A familiar story for any organiser who has looked for someone to take meeting minutes. It is this familiarity that can reaffirm what might endure with or without having space.
The stories of burnout, of not being able to continue, of ‘running out of steam’ will likely have resonance too—though there were material differences that staved off that burnout for longer than we might experience today. It is less straightforward to address problems of energy; to quantify the emotional stores we might need to keep a space open. I have often discussed with friends and comrades that not having a physical premises to maintain enables us to get on with other work, with lively debate as to whether or not it is worth it. We muse on how to navigate doing both paid and political work. Looking to history, in some instances, that balance was less of a problem for some organisers. Bob Goupillot was involved in Edinburgh unemployed workers’ centre, and he told me that “you could just about get by on the dole. And Housing Benefit just, just about if you were canny with your money, well I’m from Yorkshire so I am canny…you could just about get by, so I was a full-time political activist paid for by the state.”11 While this wasn’t universal, and the comparison to our contemporary punitive benefits system is not straightforward, the levels of welfare provision in the mid-1980s enabled some to spend more time on political organising than they otherwise could have done.
As such, it is fair that other priorities might take over from running a left-wing space. The balance of work, (child)care, community, and commitments of other organising is hard enough to navigate. However, often the negotiations that the work of running a space raises are merely displaced, rather than eliminated entirely. The division of labour, both task-based and emotional, is recurring throughout political organising. Whether it revolves around who does the dishes at the women’s centre, or who brings the banner to the march, this is merely a different manifestation of a core political issue. Where having it out in a space makes a difference is the rehearsal before the final show. To build trust and rapport, to work out antagonisms ahead of times of crises, is what sets the work of space-making apart. This is not to suggest a hierarchy of political activity, where building a space is merely a means to an end of flashier, more traditional modes of organising. Rather, the work of building spaces and of building towards actions or demonstrations are relational and co-constitutive of one another, addressing core issues as opposed to sidestepping them. The difference in fact is that the solutions, the forms of care and reconciliation, can be collectivised rather than outsourced once our political meetings are finished.
Movement and institutional memory
Another part of organising that is often deprioritised is the question of how we can record our organising as we go. In working on histories of left-wing spaces, I have repeatedly relied on oral history interviews. This is undoubtedly a deliberate and political choice that involves co-creating histories with those engaged in the same political struggle across generations. But there is an additional motivation for using oral history interviews, in that it allows some access to histories in absence. None of the spaces I researched exist in the same form today. There is no physical building left standing that can offer the same rich, emotional history as oral history interviews. Whether in the archive, or in the built environment around us, the question of where we can place our histories remains integral to the sustainability of our movement(s).
Unemployed workers’ centres, women’s centres, radical bookshops, and lesbian and gay spaces were all part of organising networks that involved institutions. The trade union movement’s relationship to unemployed workers centres offers perhaps the most typical example: membership fees, representative structures, and cultures of sociability that extended outwards into the lives of members. While the women’s liberation movement, gay liberation movement, and the Federation of Radical Booksellers as examples may not follow this exact format, the ways they worked in practice created similar cultures of organising and politicisation—and crucially, institutional memory. The existence of those institutions implied a responsibility to record, for posterity, for democratic process, for the sake of it. Where they no longer exist, who is responsible for maintaining that everyday archive?
The paper trail we create is shortened by the lack of permanent, dedicated storage to put it in. The brainstorming, the agendas and the handwritten notes are more likely to be binned at the end of each meeting if the alternative is one person taking a hefty roll of flipchart paper home. It is perhaps overly romanticised to suggest that every set of scrappy notes are worth keeping. But as our movements deal with enduring precarity, this has implications for how we capture that expertise and experience it in the moment. The space itself should not be a sticking plaster that solely answers that question. To dump and deposit does not necessarily mean we have properly noted the lessons that fast-paced political battles, heightened by casualised turnover, can teach us. If we did have the opportunity to store things regularly and durably, we should take the time and care to do it intentionally.
To build or not to build
The question of how and why we might rebuild physical spaces on the left is threefold. First, we must articulate what crises we want to use them to address. These can be multiplying, intersecting crises, but that specificity is important. If incidental and unexpected interactions were some of the richest in histories of left-wing spaces in the 1980s, these still happened in relation to a specific set of aims and a political vision for making space. Space for space’s sake serves no one.
This is most pressing in the case of rent. Many of us already pay upwards of between a third and half of our wages on rent for housing. To try and decide who should contribute and how much to the rent of a political space is undeniably difficult. Many of the spaces set out had favourable renting or cooperative agreements that lessened the financial burden of keeping the space open. To replicate that now would mean confronting the same high rents that have propelled many of us into organising in the first place.
Second, the work of building space will throw up questions and conflicts that exist irrespective of whether we attach them to particular premises. Who does the dishes at the end of a meeting might not feel like the issue of the day, but any unsatisfactory repetition of this conversation reverberates beyond the kitchen. If space-making is too much work at a particular moment, that is legitimate and an important decision to honour. But in making that decision, we might take that opportunity to reexamine how the work of organising is shared more broadly. What one organiser may have designated as too laborious may already be held disproportionately by someone else.
Finally, the durability of any new space relies on the political institutions and culture(s) we create around them. There are important spaces that exist today, some of which have endured against the odds from the 1980s. We should use them to examine the barriers to and successes of making left-wing organising a durable presence in our cities and communities. Physical spaces are not the prerequisite for victory on the left. Indeed, we have won without them at the neighbourhood, city, and national level, and we will continue to do so. It is perhaps what they enable beyond the moments of victory that is so important and integral to the reproduction and reification of those victories. The point of building space is often that those sites become more durable manifestations of left-wing culture, memory and practice. They enable a togetherness that exists outside of picket lines, marches, and demonstrations. Within them, the aim should be to build camaraderie and trust that enriches broader political strategy, that is then passed down and across to other fights. We may not want to simply rebuild the same institutions that enveloped the left-wing spaces of the 1980s, but those examples can aid us in remaking something that addresses our current political moment—and help us win.
Notes
- Federation of Radical Booksellers, Starting a Bookshop: A handbook on radical and community bookselling (Lancaster: Federation of Radical Booksellers, 1984). ↩
- Some of this work is repurposed from Hampton, Rosie, “Infrastructures of solidarity: the spatial politics of the left in 1980s Scotland” (2025). PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. ↩
- Author’s interview with George Kirkpatrick, 2021. ↩
- Chris Howell, Trade unions and the state: The construction of industrial relations institutions in Britain, 1890-2000 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). ↩
- Erin Pizzey, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear (London: Penguin, 1974), 9. ↩
- Scottish Minorities Group, “Scottish Minorities Group: Annual Report 1977 and Audited Statement of Accounts” (1977). ↩
- Scottish Minorities Group, “Annual Report 1977”. ↩
- Author’s interview with Raymond Rose, 2021. ↩
- Author’s interview with Greg Michaelson, 2021. ↩
- First of May Collective, ‘The Shop: How it Began and Current Problems,’ First of May Newsletter (1977). ↩
- Author’s interview with Bob Goupillot, 2021. ↩