For Peace! exhibition at Four Corners

'For Peace!' is an interesting exhibition at Four Corners gallery in Bethnal Green, based around material from the archive at MayDay Rooms. The focus is very much on the more radical end of peace and anti-militarist movements - not simply calling for an absence of conflict but challenging the existence of the military and the state's weapons of mass destruction which tick along beneath the radar of mainstream political discourse. Was anybody ever asked for instance whether we wanted a continuing massive US military base at Lakenheath in Suffolk? 

From this perspective the efforts of the Greenham Common and Faslane peace camps set up in the 1980s are seen as central, installing themselves at what is perhaps the real heart of the state - less  Whitehall than the fenced off compounds behind which it accumulates its missiles.

Abolish War! - Greenham common women's peace camp

The Faslane peace camp was set up in 1982 at the Royal Naval base in Scotland that is home to Britain's nuclear weapons-armed submarines

There is archive material from the direct action end of the 1950s/60s movement against the bomb (Committee of 100 and Spies for Peace) and from some less well known 1980s/90s activists such as those who opposed the 'nuclear colonialism' of testing sites and weapons bases.

'The peasants are revolting Ma'am' - a group of women protestors described in the Sun as a '15-strong feminist brigade' climbed over the wall into Buckingham Palace grounds in 1993 in solidarity with the Western Shoshone people whose land in the Nevada Desert was used as a testing ground for American and British nuclear weapons.

'Women working for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific' - a 1980s benefit at the Old White Horse in Brixton (later Brixton Jamm). The Rongelap survivors were those still living with the radioactive aftermath of the 1950s H Bomb tests in the Pacific.

There is also an emphasis     on solidarity movements such as the Troops Out Movement who campaigned for British withdrawal from Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s

1980s Southwark Troops Out Movement meeting -  SNOW venue refers to 'Squatters Network of Walworth'

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament against Trident missiles and a flyer for the 1983 'Festival for the Future' in Bristol

For Peace! at Four Corners from 9 to 24 May 2025