About
The Stuart Christie Memorial Archive was founded in the spring of 2021 and is hosted by the Mayday Rooms. The Archive preserves Stuart Christie’s private library, a collection of his personal papers, letters, his publishing endeavours, oral testimony, radical ephemera and an extensive online library of anarchist films. In an ongoing process, the archive is being expanded to include a larger collection of oral histories, which will explore the sequence of revolts associated with ‘1968’ and the long winter of reaction that followed in the 1970’s.
Stuart Christie’s life spanned several revolutionary movements, imprisonment and one of the longest criminal trials in English legal history, after which he was acquitted. He died in the summer of 2020, leaving us an impressive political legacy. The archive is a testament to everything Stuart was able to achieve before his untimely death, despite stints in prison and a period of judicious political exile on the rugged archipelago of Orkney. It is altogether a reflection of his political commitment to anarchism, his curiosity and independent-minded determination to challenge old dogmas, all of which often required him to step away from established paths, even within the radical left.
The online archive features ten collections entitled: ‘CND and Committee of 100’, Solidarity: Scotland’, ‘Letters from Spain: The Prison Years’, ‘1968’, ‘Black Flag’, ‘Cienfuegos Press’, ‘Photographs’ and ‘Oral Histories’ . These collections include pamphlets, prison correspondence from Francoist Spain, as well as interviews with Stuart’s co-defendants in the ‘Angry Brigade’ trial. Christie had a passion to communicate and share ideas, which is why, when we decided to build an archive in his memory, we embarked on digitalising as much of the physical collection as we could.
The physical archive and library held in the Mayday Rooms and be accessed here
All material uploaded on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at stuartchristiearchive@maydayrooms.org