Welcome to The Sparrows' Nest, Nottingham

Our big event of the Summer was the launch on June 22 of a marvellous new work, A City of Light: Socialism, Chartism and Co-operation – Nottingham 1844 by local author, and friend of the Nest, Christopher Richardson.

Welcome to the first of reports we are aiming to bring you each month, so that you can see what we’ve been up to and what we have been buying for the library.

Keith Leonard was a co-founder of Mushroom Bookshop, Nottingham's alternative and radical bookshop (which served hippies, activists and other malcontents between 1972-2000). He sadly died at Nottingham QMC on August 7th 2009 from heart problems, after years of living with disability.

Keith was born in Kent and studied maths at Cambridge. But in 1972, after a spell as a landscape gardener, he set up Mushroom with his then partner (now a Sparrows’ Nest Collective member).