Welcome to the Sparrows' Nest Library and Archive

Based in Nottingham (UK), we look after tens of thousands of books, journals, pamphlets, zines, leaflets, posters and other items documenting the anarchist movement in the UK and beyond, as well as local radical history. Browse our catalogue, access digitised records in our free Digital Library and get in touch to arrange a visit.
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News and events

News and events from The Sparrows' Nest.

Our regular schedule continues to be messed up by our extensive preparations for our upcoming Nottingham Prints exhibition of local radical and alternative papers. So please see the full list of additions below a bit earlier than normal. We are very glad that, following last month's uploads, we have kindly been supplied with a digital copy of the one issue of Black Chip that was missing from our collections and we believe now to have a full set of this fascinating journal. Thank you!

We just posted a long list of recent additions to the Digital Library, and here comes the long overdue new Document of the Month feature!

This month we picked a local title which will also be featured in our upcoming exhibtion, an excellent example for a local alternative newspaper, providing us with that other first draft of history, documenting what other titles preferred to ignore, in this case e.g. by reporting on local resistance to the opening of the NF headquarters right in the City Centre back in 1978:

Nottingham Voice #78 (1978)

Please see below our latest additions to the Digital Library. As always there were some requests by visitors, but this month we have mostly added the promised additions to local LGBTQ+ papers and newssheets, notably the lesbian papers Lookout! and Diversion. A comprehensive digital archive of all local LGBT+ papers is still a good way away, but we are getting closer!

Furthermore we did finally get round to digitise our (incomplete) set of the Anarchist computer/technology journal Black Chip from the mid 1980s, a fascinating reading indeed.

Many thanks to the Nottinghamshire's Rainbow Heritage for allowing us access to their archives to add to the materials already in our collection.

Apologies, although we did add materials to the server last month, it has been a while since you a proper update. But we have been beavering away as ever, sorting, cataloguing and digitising materials.

We are currently focussing on preparing for our upcoming exhibition of local alternative and radical news media (and will stay rather busy doing that for a little while yet!), so many of the documents below are local stuff, but as ever they are mixed with various cool things we came across, as well as a good number of documents that were requested by visitors.

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