The West Country’s Counterculture: Civil rights, anti-war activism, folk music, psychedelia, women’s liberation, class struggle, radical media, alternative technology, free festivals… and all sorts of other splendid things

Continuing our series on the counterculture and as part of the Cube's Hippy Trippy month, we will welcome Steve Hunt, author of Angela Carter’s “Provincial Bohemia”. He will give an overview of the counterculture in Bristol and the West Country through the lens of the work and experiences of Angela Carter. Angela Carter is widely appreciated as one of the most creative and engaging English writers of the late Twentieth Century, being author of such bestsellers as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. She lived in Bristol throughout the 1960s, and in Bath during the mid-1970s. Steve will share further glimpses into the era that have come to light since the publication of his book.

Looking back on the 1960s, Angela Carter wrote “There’s no denying that towards the end of the decade everyday life, even where I was living, in Bristol, took on an air of continuous improvisation… the particularly leafy and graceful bit of Bristol where I lived attracted festal behaviour. Carpe diem. Pleasure. It didn’t have to cost much, either” (“Truly, It Felt Like Year One”, 1988).

What was this “festal behaviour”? Expect encounters with the famous, the infamous, and the forgotten. Steve will consider the counterculture as a continuation of a historic tradition of Romanticism and its legacy and significance in the present day. The counterculture is still alive, and its pulse is still felt in the West Country’s cultural life. Yet it has become contested, and the backlash has been severe and is ongoing.

This will be an opportunity to reflect on the 1960s-1980s counterculture in a spirit of celebration but also critique.

Steve Hunt is on the committee of the Angela Carter Society and is a member of the Bristol Radical History Group.