The History of Radical Community Media
Dr Kate Wilson explores how radical community media from the 1970s and 1980s, including Castlemilk Today, The Gorbals View and The Easterhouse Voice, served as organising tools for tenant struggles, helped working-class to challenge power, satirised urban policy, and showcased poetry from local writers.
By Dr Kate Wilson | Letterset image by ‘harleypeddie’, CC BY 2.0 Wikimedia Commons
The city of Glasgow has always been the subject of story-making; its myths are continually made and remade. It has been characterised as the industrial Red Clydeside; the slum; the enclave of the Hard Man and razor gangs; and the New Glasgow, regenerated from post-industrial wasteland to new ‘cultural’ metropolis.
These narratives are often used to support policy and are bound up with the city’s perpetual urban regeneration project. Glasgow’s ‘image’ is often used to justify intervention into communities, validating the demolition of homes, the relocation of residents, and the allocation or refusal of public funding. Where do stories about the city come from, and who gets to tell them?
In a series of workshops, we explored the role working-class communities across the city played in challenging, negotiating and creating these narratives of place from the post-war period onwards. The 1970s and 1980s in particular saw an outpouring of community media offering new visions of areas which had been ignored, misrepresented and maligned by many authors, academics and the mainstream press. We focused on community newspapers in three areas – Castlemilk (Castlemilk Today), Easterhouse (The Voice) and the Gorbals and Govanhill (The View) – using archival material and oral history interviews with the people involved to trace their impact at the time and their legacy and relevance today.
All three newspapers were started with the involvement of Christian ministers, and all three emerged out of a need to challenge negative images of these areas, which were often presented as slums, worthy only of demolition, or as gang-ridden no-go areas. Instead, these newspapers published local poetry and fiction, and good news stories about people, pubs and places. As one interviewee said: “We really had to get the agenda by the scruff of the neck”. At the same time, the newspapers refused to shy away from conflict. They campaigned for better conditions in the schemes, from new or improved facilities to decent housing and childcare, holding politicians and planners to account.
Importantly, in all three cases, the clergy eventually withdrew from the papers, and local people took the lead. Some interviewees told me stories of setting out articles with Letraset and cutting and pasting newspapers together with cow gum at kitchen tables and on floors in community centres; others told me how their newspaper became a catalyst for community groups like tenants’ associations and older people’s day centres to come together once a month and define common issues.
In their new forms, the papers also took on a more radical tone. In the Gorbals and Govanhill for example, The View became the mouthpiece for an anti-dampness campaign, spreading news about the campaign’s events and successes and supporting tenants to participate in a rent strike. In Castlemilk Today, one editorial on ‘large government departments’ declared: ‘We must help the people of Castlemilk get at these people and cut them down to size’.
Through these new ways of working – with no one person in charge, and everyone’s input given equal value – people shared skills and learned from one another. Neighbours taught each other to sell advertising space, hold meetings, and write and edit work on issues which were important to them. As one interviewee said: “It was not just community action, but it was adult education”.
For some, seeing their work published, often for the first time, assured them that their voices mattered, and they had the power to challenge those who told them they didn’t. While everyone I interviewed had different views on the newspapers looking back, they all emphasised the long-term impact of taking part: some went on to a lifetime of political activism; others found their way to working-class cultural-political activities in the late 1980s and 1990s such as community writers’ groups; others recalled having more confidence to stand up for themselves in everyday situations.
We ended our workshops by discussing what this kind of media can and should look like today and proposing new articles of our own. Outrageously, the fights found in the pages of The Voice, The View and Castlemilk Today fifty years ago remained as relevant and urgent as ever: the right to decent, dry and genuinely affordable homes; the need to counter stigma and negative images of places where people live; and the importance of free, democratic spaces where people can produce their own culture in collaboration with others.
While the days of Letraset and cow gum on the community centre floor may be over, the radical, local-led way these community newspapers were organised could help provide a blueprint for these fights in the future.
More information about the workshops will be added to the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, an online archive of historical and contemporary cultural-political material and movements in the city: glasgowtenantsarchive.com.
All of the community newspapers discussed in this article, along with many others, are available to view for free in the National Library of Scotland and Glasgow’s Mitchell Library.
If you’d like to find out more about histories of community media in Glasgow, or contribute to the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, contact kate.wilson-2@manchester.ac.uk or joeysimons35@gmail.com.
Throughout June, we are taking part in the 'No News is Bad News’ campaign – which is founded on the belief that a well-informed community is more able to act together to shape its own future, that local news is fundamental to a healthy democratic society and invaluable in helping to create strong communities. As part of this campaign, any money we raise for the project during June will be doubled by an Indie News Fund.