Contested Commons with Katrina Navickas and Bristol Radical History Group

Bristol Radical History Group and Bookhaus are delighted to present Katrina Navickas speaking about her recent book Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England. 

A radical history of England, Contested Commons is a gripping overview of increasingly restrictive policing and legislation against protest in public spaces. It tells the long history of contests over Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Cable Street and Kinder Scout, as well as sites in towns and rural areas across the country. Navickas reveals how protesters claimed these spaces as their own commons, resisting their continuing enclosure and exclusion by social and political elites. She investigates famous and less well-known demonstrations and protest marches, from early democracy, trade union movements and the Suffragettes to anti-fascist, Black rights and environmental campaigners in more recent times. Contested Commons offers positive as well as troubling lessons on how we protect the right to protest. 

The talk will be followed by a Q&A chaired by Steve Poole, Professor Emeritus of History and Heritage at UWE. 

Tickets are free but must be booked in advance. Presented by bookhaus.

Katrina Navickas is a historian of popular protest and democratic movements in England. Her books include Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion Books, 2025), and Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester University Press, 2016). In 2026, she appeared as an expert witness at the Joint Parliamentary Select Committee on Human Rights, in a session on the right to protest. She was Professor of British History at the University of Hertfordshire until very recently, and will be taking up a new post in Oxford later in 2026.  

Steve Poole is Professor Emeritus of History and Heritage at UWE, Bristol and former Director of the University’s Regional History Centre. He has published widely on social movements, political protest and criminality in England in the long eighteenth century c1715-1832 and has a particular interest in histories of South West England ‘from below’.