"five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden".Read more on the park at the Wirral local government site.
This introductory post is somewhat unconventional as it does not appear as the earliest post on this blog. This is because I have imported a number of posts from another blog of mine, which used to be themed around the history of counter-culture. Due to pressures of research, work and writing other blogs I cannot dedicate enough time to that subject to keep that blog going in that form. It is now going to be my personal/general blog.
I still wish to maintain a blog on the subject of history where I can share my thoughts, writing and research. As such this blog will focus on modern history (or if you prefer post-medieval history). I am going to look over some of my undergraduate essays and see if they can be edited into a form suitable for posting here, and I will also share some of the fruits of my current research on the response of British newspapers to the French Revolution. I will also share links to primary and secondary sources, and other web based materials that will be interesting to historians of the modern world.
[This article was originally posted here]
Often regarded as a staunchly conservative English county, Surrey does have something of a history as a focus point for counter-cultural activity. During Cromwell's Republic, Gerrard Winstanley set up a commune on common land at St. Georges Hill, near Weybridge - now one of the most exclusive areas of the country. Those gathered around Winstanley were known as the Diggers (although they called themselves the True Levellers). They promoted a form of Christian anarcho-communism, stating in The True Leveller's Standard Advanced (1649) that:
[the] Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.
Winstanley explained his forward-thinking egalitarian beliefs in The New Law of Righteousness (1649):
Every one that gets an authority into his hands tyrannizes over others; as many husbands, parents, masters, magistrates, that live after the flesh do carry themselves like oppressing lords over such as are under them, not knowing that their wives, children, servants, subjects are their fellow creatures, and hath an equal privilege to share them in the blessing of liberty.
Needless to say the Diggers were harassed by local land owners and eventually the group dispersed. Nevertheless, their legacy lived on. In the 1960s a group in San Francisco called themselves the Diggers in memory of Winstanley et al.
In the Nineteenth Century, Surrey again played host to another experiment in communal living. A group centered on the christian socialist and education reformer James Pierrepont-Greaves set up a commune at Alcott House in Ham Common called the Concordium. The group, including Charles Lane, William Oldham, and Henry Gardner-Wright, believed that spiritual and social renewal would be achieved by a change of lifestyle. As such they promoted vegetarianism, hydrotherapy, mesmerism and other 'new age' ideologies.
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