Showing 15 results

The Camden Lesbian Centre Project (CLCP) was founded in 1982, when several women from a loose social collective known as Kentish Town Lesbian Group (based at the nearby Kentish Town Women’s Workshop) recognised the need for a space expressly for lesbians. The group - all of whom were white lesbians - successfully applied for grant funding from Camden Council Women's Committee, and they began organising regular meetings and events with a view to establishing a centre for lesbians. In 1984, the Black Lesbian Group was founded as a support group for Black lesbians and lesbians of colour, who faced the tripartite barriers of homophobia, racism, and misogyny; the group used the term 'Black' in the broader political sense.

Having worked closely together, Camden Lesbian Centre Project and the Black Lesbian Group merged to form the Camden Lesbian Centre and Black Lesbian Group (CLCBLG) in 1985. Despite their differences and the fact that CLCP had originally excluded Black lesbians from its initial stages, BLG members felt the merger presented an opportunity to improve things for their community. The merger agreement stipulated that at least 50% of CLCBLG's staff and its Management Committee would comprise Black lesbians and that around half of the Centre's events and workshops would be for Black lesbians only.

From 1985-86, CLCBLG sought out premises across Camden. Although initially unsure of how the site would work for them, the group eventually applied for a change of use for a former retail space at 54-56 Phoenix Road, which they were granted amidst vocal resistance and homophobia from some local residents. The group signed the lease in September 1986. CLCBLG worked with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, Support Community Building and Common Ownership Design and Construct (CODAC) to renovate and alter the Centre before opening its doors to the public on Saturday 31 October 1987. From this point onward, the Centre was a social and political hub for many strands of London's lesbian community, becoming home to workshops, socials, seminars, discussion groups and other events. It became the base of groups like the Older Lesbian Network, Zamimass Black lesbian group, and GEMMA, the friendship network for disabled and non-disabled lesbians.

With successive and ever more severe cuts to grant funding from Camden Council, CLCBLG was forced to scale down its paid staff members and operations from c.1990 onwards. The Centre eventually wrapped up its operations in 1996, when the group was informed that they'd receive no grant funding in that year's budget.

BLK Publishing Co., Inc. was founded in 1988 to produce a series of company-owned magazines. They began offering graphic design as a separate service in 1994, and in the years that followed added other publishing-related services such as copy writing, editing, photography and print management. Primarily based in the US, BLK has developed strong working relations with nonprofits and healthcare organisations, particularly ones that advocate for racial equity and social justice causes.

Black Womantalk was a publishing co-operative set up by a group of unemployed women of African and Asian descent, who - in their own words - 'felt strongly about creating the space and the means for our voices to be heard'. Black Womantalk primarily focused on organising events and readings led by Black women writers and women writers of colour, as well as publishing several poetry collections.

Members of the co-operative included Gabriela Pearse, Bernadine Evaristo, Olivette Cole Wilson, Da Choong, Sylvia Parker, and others.

Big Flame were a revolutionary socialist feminist organisation with a working class orientation in England. Founded in Liverpool in 1970, the group initially grew rapidly in the then prevailing climate on the left with branches appearing in a number of cities.

They published a magazine, also entitled Big Flame, and a journal, Revolutionary Socialism. Members were active at the Ford plants at Halewood and Dagenham. They also devoted a great deal of time to self-analysis and considering their relationship with the larger Trotskyist groups. In time, they came to describe their politics as “libertarian Marxist“. In 1978 they joined the Socialist Unity electoral coalition, with the International Marxist Group. In 1980, the anarchists of the Libertarian Communist Group joined Big Flame. The Revolutionary Marxist Current also joined at about this time.

A Woman's Place (AWP) was a feminist collective and women's resource and information centre based at Hungerford House, Victoria Embankment, London WC2. Established around the early 1970s, AWP was a key site of knowledge exchange and connection for women across and beyond the WLM, producing research reports, coordinating events and social gatherings (with childcare provision), and making a range of information services available to women. In the mid 1980s, AWP's upper space was home to the Feminist Library for a short time before the Library moved to its present home in Southwark around 1986.

It is unclear when AWP wound up its operations, but material in CLCBLG/4 seems to indicate that this happened around c.1986.