Alternative Local Press (United Kingdom)

From the 1970s to the 1990s, alternative local newspapers sprang up in towns and cities across Britain, challenging mainstream media's social, political, and journalistic conservatism. This press was diverse, reflecting local conditions and different priorities. Most titles were short-lived but some lasted for 1 or even 2 decades; some were created by disgruntled journalists, but most were the product of people with no training in journalism. Most were monthly, some less frequent, and a few weekly; all relied on unpaid labor, but several also had some low-paid staff. Few survived past the mid–1990s.

They emerged in the context of a number of anticolonial wars and widespread student protests and industrial conflict in Europe. Britain was experiencing the beginnings of the breakdown of the post–1945 economic and political “consensus.” There was an upsurge in the confidence and activities of social movements, including feminism, gay liberation, antiracism, antifascism, antinuclear, and, alongside a growth in self-organization within working-class communities as tenants groups, claimants unions, and housing action groups were formed.

[Page 14]There already existed a so-called underground or counterculture press, such as Oz, and some young radicals were becoming familiar with U.S. examples, such as the Village Voice. All this coincided with the arrival of relatively cheap and easy offset litho printing, heralding a new do-it-yourself publishing culture.

These papers, as they emerged, drew from and reported on the community politics and social movements that had emerged in the wake of 1968. Some of the best-known titles, indicating their geographical spread, included Aberdeen People's Press, Alarm (Swansea), Brighton Voice, Bristol Voice, Cardiff People's Press, Durham Street Press, Exeter Flying Post, Glasgow News, Hackney People's Press, Islington Gutter Press, Leeds Other Paper, Liverpool Free Press, Manchester Free Press, the Post (Hull), Rochdale Alternative Press, and Sheffield Free Press.

Sales ranged from a few hundred to several thousand. The majority were run by informal collectives or workers cooperatives. They reported “from below” the views and actions of people in a range of local struggles, living on low-income housing estates, community groups, rank and file union activists, unemployed workers, and activists within the women's and gay movements and Black communities. Typically, they acted as a watchdog on the local establishment and the forces of law and order and provided a notice-board to publicize a vast range of alternative and noncommercial events, services, and networks. Many provided free listings or accepted paid advertising from community or political events, local co-ops, and benefit gigs, and their pages could be locations of lively debate. Such papers served and helped constitute what might be referred to as the “alternative public sphere.”

However, they were not homogenous. Some, including Liverpool Free Press and Manchester Free Press, were set up by journalists employed by their local commercial newspaper who felt the need for an alternative outlet on the side. Most, however, were produced by people with no formal journalistic training, who taught themselves while on the job. This emergent press was informed by a libertarian socialist ethos, and those involved were interested not only in producing alternative content but also in developing alternative or “prefigurative” ways of working together. Typically, such publications had relatively open structures, with readers being invited to join in and become producers. With open editorial policies and a shifting population of contributors, an alternative paper such as Leeds Other Paper—one of the longest lasting—might change its style and priorities several times within a short space of time.

...