‘Burn it down!’: Materialising intersectional solidarities in the architecture of the South African Embassy during the London Poll Tax Riot, March 1990

Abstract

This paper offers a new way of conceptualising how intersectional solidarities are actualised. It recounts and theorises an outbreak of radical internationalism, when working class struggles in Britain and South Africa were unexpectedly linked. It examines how intersectional solidarity was materialised through a process of coming together against the architectural fabric of the South African Embassy and considers the interwoven temporalities that enabled this action to occur. On 31 March 1990, nearly a quarter of a million people demonstrated in London against the Poll Tax that was due to take effect in England and Wales the following day. On the day, the Metropolitan Police lost control of an already enraged crowd and provoked a large scale riot that engulfed the West End of London for several hours. In the midst of the riot, during a short retreat by the police, protesters took the opportunity to attack the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square – many windows were broken and an attempt was made to set the building alight. Drawing on interviews with former anti-apartheid protesters who were present on that day (and who had concluded a four-year long Non-Stop Picket of the embassy a month earlier), this paper explores and analyses their memories of that unexpected moment when their previously symbolic call to ‘burn it down’ was (almost) materialised. In doing so, it contributes new ways of conceptualising the spatiality and temporality of intersectional solidarity.

Spatializing Solidarity: Agricultural Cooperatives as Solidarity Transformers in Cuba*

“…We deployed this framework to analyze the sociospatial conditions for solidarity in and around agricultural cooperatives. In doing so, we expanded the spatial imaginations of solidarity (Brown 2020; Featherstone 2012; Kelliher 2018; Routledge 2012). Following Durkheim, our account suggests a mutuality between interpersonal acts of solidarity and systemic orders of solidarity at the level of the cooperative and its village.…”

New protest history: Exploring the historical geographies and geographical histories of resistance through gender, practice, and materiality

“…Another recent strand of work has utilized the built environment as material objects, in order to better understand the mutually constitutive relationship between dissent and the material characteristics of the urban landscape. Recent notable studies in this vein include Ealham's () analysis of Barcelona's radical working‐class Raval district between 1883 and 1936, and Brown's () study of the attack on the South African Embassy in London during the 1990 Poll Tax Riot. Percy's () comparative study of strikes in early twentieth‐century London and Chicago explores how the built environment of the two cities encouraged different protest tactics.…”

Everyday Spatialities of Intersectional Solidarity and Activism

“…For him, the relationship between miners in Britain’s coalfields and London’s more multicultural and diverse working classes had been laid down over more than a decade before the strike and included the miners own support for striking Asian women workers at the Grunwick film processing plant in the 1970s. As Brown (2020) has argued, in his analysis of an attack on the apartheid‐era South African embassy in London during a protest against the introduction of a Poll Tax on all adults in Britain in 1990, many expressions of intersectional solidarity are moments of coming together against a (perceived) common enemy, by diverse participants with interstruggle over the making of everyday sectional experiences of multiple structures of oppression. Such events might be contrasted with more intrinsic expressions of coming together with across intersectional differences, as are discussed in many of the papers in this issue (e.g.…”