Industry | Publishing |
---|---|
Genre | Politics |
Founded | London, UK, 1886 |
Founder | Charlotte Wilson |
Headquarters | 84b Whitechapel High Street, London, UK |
Website | https://freedompress.org.uk |
Freedom Press is an anarchist publishing house in Whitechapel, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1886, it is the largest anarchist publishing house in the country and the oldest of its kind in the English speaking world. It is based at 84b Whitechapel High Street in the East End of London.
Alongside its many books and pamphlets, the group also runs a news and comment-based website and until recently regularly published Freedom, which was the only regular anarchist newspaper published nationally in the UK. The collective took the decision to close publication of the full newspaper in March 2014, with the intention of moving most of its content online and switching to a less regular freesheet for paper publication.
Other regular publications by Freedom Press have included Freedom Bulletin, Spain and the World, Revolt! and War Commentary.
The core group which went on to form Freedom Press came out of a circle of anarchists with international connections formed around the London-based radical firebrand Charlotte Wilson, a Cambridge-educated writer and public speaker who was in the process of breaking from Fabian Society orthodoxy. Among this founding group were Nikola Chaikovski, Francesco Saverio Merlino, and as of 1886, celebrated anarchist-communist Peter Kropotkin, who had been invited to Britain by Wilson after his release from prison in France in January of that year.
Wilson led a group of anarchists in founding Freedom as a social anarchist and anarchist communist group in September 1886, just a month after losing a vote in which the Fabians formally backed the parliamentary route to socialism. Alongside starting Freedom newspaper as a monthly beginning in October, the group also produced other pamphlets and books, primarily translations of international writers including Errico Malatesta, Jean Grave, Gustav Landauer, Max Nettlau, Domela Nieuwenhuis, Emile Pouget, Varlaam Cherkezov, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and of course, Kropotkin himself. Discussion groups and public meetings were also begun early on.