. Government inspectors issued a confidential — and scathing — report on the Scotland Road Free School just a few months before it closed, Liverpool People’s History has discovered. The inspectors visited on six days in June and July 1973, as a long-running dispute...
Revolting students: Liverpool University sit-in, 1970
In 1970, on the afternoon of March 9, some 300 students occupied the Senate House at Liverpool University and hoisted a red flag over the building. Half an hour earlier the vice-chancellor and the university’s treasurer had walked out of a mass meeting with students....
Democracy in the classroom: Scotland Road Free School
In the summer of 1971 residents of Liverpool’s Vauxhall area received a leaflet announcing plans for a new local school — plans that were little short of revolutionary. Scotland Road Free School, the leaflet said, would have no headmaster or hierarchy and lessons...
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The Bridewell and the Boys from the Blackstuff
Much of Alan Bleasdale’s acclaimed TV drama was filmed at a former police station on Prescot Street.
Scotland Road Free School
Come to school when you want and do what you like. The Free School was a bold experiment in classroom democracy that didn’t work out.
Police, drugs and ‘agriculture’ in Toxteth
In 1971 there were two notable court cases where black men accused of possessing cannabis were acquitted after claiming police had planted it.
The battle to save Fisher Bendix
The Fisher Bendix factory in Kirkby had been built with government help to ease unemployment in the area. It wasn’t a success and in 1972 when the owners tried to shut it down workers occupied the factory in an effort to save their jobs. Three years later they began running it themselves.
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