Housmans Bookshop

BOOK LAUNCH: Renters Unite by Jacob Stringer
2025-03-29 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/London)
Join us for an evening with Jacob Stringer as he discusses his vital new book Renters Unite: How Tenant Unions Are Fighting the Housing Crisis

‘Eye-opening, practical, thoughtful and revolutionary‘

– Danny Dorling, author of Peak Injustice: Solving Britain’s Inequality Crisis

‘A birds-eye view of tenant organizing across the global north that touches down in moving stories of everyday struggle, Renters Unite! is a generous and urgent reflection on the diversity of tactics in our movement—to turn individual fear into collective defiance, to deepen our roots in our communities, and to scale up our work to win the housing and the world we deserve‘

– Tracy Rosenthal, co-author of Abolish Rent

Housmans is delighted to welcome long-time organizer Jacob Stringer to the shop to talk about his essential new book, penned from the front lines of the housing crisis.

As housing crises proliferate around the world, so does the fightback. A new generation of tenants’ unions are rising up to demand good, affordable housing for all. From the streets of Los Angeles to the avenues of Berlin, these unions are rewriting the playbook on community empowerment and direct action. Stringer navigates the joys and perils of a new and exciting form of political organising. Through vivid storytelling and analysis, this book takes readers to the frontlines to expose the brutality of criminal landlords and exploitative housing.It’s time to say no to bad landlords and join the movement for housing justice!

Jacob Stringer is a housing and social movements researcher, and a member of London Renters Union. His work has appeared in openDemocracy. He will be in conversation with researcher and activist Jess Adams from Newcastle University. Jess works in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Institutes: the Institute for Social Science, the Humanities Research Institute and Institute for Creative Arts Practice. Her research uses a militant methodology to understand contemporary notions of participation via an examination of her experience of participating in Corbynism and post-Corbynism.

Advanced booking strongly recommended. Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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Book Launch: CTRL HATE DELETE by Cécile Simmons
2025-04-01 19:00 - 20:30
How did Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s divorce become the centre of the anti-#MeToo backlash? Why have so many teen boys fallen under the thrall of Andrew Tate, a failed reality show contestant? And why are a growing number of influencers like #tradwives dressing up like 1950s housewives and preaching total subservience to men? In the years since #MeToo – the largest social media facilitated feminist campaign in history – Roe v. Wade has been overturned in the United States, there have been attacks on reproductive rights in multiple countries and female political leaders have withdrawn from the world stage citing the level of abuse they get as a reason.

Join us as we welcome Cécile Simmons to the shop to talk about her essential new book: CTRL HATE DELETE which takes a deep dive into how a collection of misogynists and their allies have turned male supremacist ideology from a niche set of beliefs into a mainstream movement. With interviews from experts, influencers and activists, it outlines how to fight the rising tide of online misogyny and make online spaces more equal and inclusive.

Cécile Simmons is an investigative researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue focusing on disinformation, misogyny, and digital culture. She was previously an advisor to the charity Glitch, which focuses on ending gender-based online violence, and also advises tech companies, government bodies and civil society organisations on online harms. She has written for publications including The Guardian, Politico, WIRED and Cosmopolitan and appeared as an expert commentator on broadcast media including BBC Newsnight, France 24 and ABC News.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + event entry’ or ‘special bundle’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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Book Talk: THE WAGES OF DREAM WORK: Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor
2025-04-05 19:00 - 20:30
Housmans are absolutely delighted to be welcoming Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel to the shop to discuss their essential new book from Minor Compositions:The Wages of Dreamwork. Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor.

Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of economic growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to hold together the demands of paying the rent and bills while managing all the tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to manage the tensions between creating spaces for creativity and imagination while working through the constraints posed by economic conditions?

In a more traditional workplace it is generally easy to distinguish between those who planned and managed the labor process and those who were involved in its executions: between the managers and the managed. For creative workers these distinctions become increasingly hard to make. Today the passionate and self-motivated labor of the artisan increasingly becomes the model for a self-disciplining, self-managed labor force that works harder, longer, and often for less pay precisely because of its attachment to some degree of personal fulfillment in forms of engaging work. And that ain’t no way to make a living, having to struggle three times as hard for just to have a sense of engagement in meaningful work.

The Wages of Dreamworkinvestigates how cultural workers in the modern metropolis manage these competing tensions and demands. Does the cultural economy treat you as a tool? If so, perhaps it’s time to rethink how to down tools in this metropolitan factory.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + event entry’ or ‘special bundle’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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Book Launch: We Are Not Anonymous by Stephen Oram
2025-04-09 19:00 - 20:30
A Working Utopia?

In a near-future England, fractured into three nations and ravaged by climate floods, Naomi, a fiercely determined activist, and Beth, her courageous partner, fight for a better world. Their love deepens as they take on Kai, the ruthless leader of the tech-elite Narcissists, whose experiments on children and government-controlling technology threaten to reshape humanity itself.

As part of the activist group Resist and Regain, Beth and Naomi battle to subvert Kai’s ambitions and create a more equal and transparent world. But as the stakes rise, Beth must face a harrowing choice: should she try to dismantle Kai’s regime at the cost of her family’s safety—and their future?

Housmans is delighted to launch Stephen Oram’s sci-fi thriller We Are Not Anonymous with a probing conversation exploring some of its major themes between Oram and Eva Pascoe, co-chair of CyberSalon.

We will never agree what utopia looks like; a utopia for some is a dystopia for others. Should we simply forget our attempts to define what utopia looks like? Should we, instead, agree on how we organise ourselves and make our decisions; our continuous process of becoming?

With the rise of the tech oligarchs and their algorithms dividing us, how do we resist? Their rapid development of technology is unlikely to slow down, but can we use it for communal benefit?

We Are Not Anonymous is an accessible sci-fi thriller rooted in today’s concerns about AI, billionaire tech barons, climate change, politics and government, personal rights, data ownership and police militarization. But it’s also an inspiring story about the power of activism, community and the resourcefulness of humanity.

“Stephen Oram combines gripping storytelling with scientific literacy and original SF. Instead of rearranging tropes he comes up with new ideas.” Geoff Ryman, multi-award-winning author of HIM.

“Now that we’ve lived into the future that cyberpunk projected, we urgently need to fight our way out. This book imagines and encourages that fight.” Ken MacLeod, multi-award winning author.

“A frighteningly credible near-future dystopia that is as convincing as it is disturbing, We Are Not Anonymous unfolds with cinematic scale and urgency.” Ewan Morrison, award winning author and essayist.

“An intellectually arresting, thought-provoking work of creative futurism that drives our current politics and technology to their magical — and logical — extremes.” Ana Sun, author.

“Stephen Oram combines gripping storytelling with scientific literacy and original SF. Instead of rearranging tropes he comes up with new ideas.” Geoff Ryman, multi-award-winning author of HIM.

“A gripping near future yarn, We Are Not Anonymous is an inspiring story for those who believe that courage can outmatch control.” Eva Pascoe, co-founder of digital futures think tank, Cybersalon.

STEPHEN ORAM writes social science fiction set in the near-future, exploring the intersection of messy humans and imperfect technology. Previously, he has two published novels, three collections of sci-fi shorts and is published in many anthologies, including the award-winning Best of British Science Fiction 2022 (Newcon Press). He also works with scientists and technologists to explore possible outcomes of their research with the public through short stories and has co-edited four anthologies along these lines. Previously, he was the head of policy for post-16 skills strategic development and innovation at the Department for Education. Stephen is based in the heart of central London and, alongside his experience of living inside and outside of the establishment, he attributes much of the urban grittiness and the optimism about humanity in his writing to the noise, the bustle, and the diverse community of where he lives.

EVA PASCOE is co-chairperson of CyberSalon and has pioneered ecommerce in the UK. She was a co-founder of Cyberia, the first global cybercafé chain and Easynet Internet Service Provider. She has recently co-authored digital retail policy papers on “Re-Imagining the High Street” and a new policy for West End of London in her “Surf and Turf” contribution to a recent publication commissioned by Centre for London and New West End Company. She regularly speaks at key retail industry events run by the Retail Institute and runs a weekly digital innovations blog “The Retail Bytes” at steering the sector through technological challenges. Eva has been at the forefront of the commercialisation of the Internet since the 1990s, contributing significantly to retail practice, public policy, training and education ever since.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + event entry’ or ‘special bundle’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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BOOK LAUNCH: Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020
2025-04-16 19:00 - 20:30
Join us for a discussion with the cohort behind this fantastic co-authored book that establishes the protest song as a mode of political communication. Covering five centuries in England’s history, from street ballads and art song to grime, hymns, music hall, and punk, this book explores the causes that protest songs adopt, the conditions that give rise to them, and the institutions that have suppressed them.

Whether accompanying a march, a sit-in, or a confrontation with police, songs and protest are inextricably linked. As a tool for political activism, the protest song spells out the issues at the heart of each cause. Over a surprisingly long history, it has been used to spread ideas, inspire political imagination, and motivate political action.

The protest song is – and has always been – a form of political oratory as vital to political representation as it is to performance. Investigating five centuries of English history, Our Subversive Voice establishes that the protest song is not merely the preserve of singer-songwriters; it is a mode of political communication that has been used to confront many systems of oppression across its many genres, from street ballads to art song, grime to hymns, and music hall to punk. Our Subversive Voice traces the history of the protest song, examines its rhetorical forms, and explores the conditions of its genesis. It recounts how these songs have addressed discrimination and inequality, exploitation and the environment, and immigration and identity, and how institutions and organizations have sought both to facilitate and to suppress them. Drawing on a large and diverse corpus of songwriters, this book argues that song does more than accompany protest: it choreographs and communicates it.

The protest song, Our Subversive Voice shows, is an enduring, affecting, and effective means of expression and an essential element in understanding the drive to create political change, in the past and for the future.

Our speakers:

John Street is emeritus professor of politics at the University of East Anglia.

Oskar Cox Jensen is a NUAcT Fellow in music at Newcastle University.

Alan Finlayson is professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia.

Angela McShane is honorary reader in history at the University of Warwick.

Matthew Worley is professor of modern history at the University of Reading.

Advanced booking strongly recommended. Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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CANCELLED: the87press & Housmans Bookshop present: Hummingbirds 5.0, a literary salon
2025-04-25 19:00 - 21:00
SADLY THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED. WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

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POETRY READING: KYLE LOVELL & ALEX MARSH DOUBLE BOOK LAUNCH
2025-04-26 19:00 - 21:00
WE ARE BACK with another absolutely stellar poetry reading. Our friends over at The Poet’s Hardship Fund have been busy with one of their fantastic imprints Chaff. We will be launching two new titles: Kyle Lovell’s equisite God Bless All Petty Thieves and Alex Marsh’s ingenius Holding Pattern.

Alongside Kyle and Alex we are blessed to have the amazing poets James Goodwin and Nell Osbourne

PRE-ORDERS

Pre-orders can be placed here:

https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=TYJTXU5FBUP8CPlease include your name and address in the info box, and the name of the book you would like.

It is £8 for one, or £15 for both. All cash goes straight to the Poet’s Hardships Fund.

Any profits from pamphlet sales on the evening will also be going to the Poet’s Hardship Fund.

OUR POETS:

Kyle Lovell is the editor of Fathomsun Press. Their poems haveappeared in Blackbox Manifold, Pamenar Press, and LUDD GANG. They arethe author of Each Sharper Complication (legitimate snack, 2020), Inthe Debt of Love (And False Fire, 2021), and a co-author of theSonnets for Hooch series. Their latest pamphlet is ‘God Bless AllPetty Thieves’ (Chaff, 2025).

Alex Marsh is a poet from London. His previous books include Silo Bliss (SPAM Press), Ten Red Mornings (Death of Workers) and Two in the Wave (Distance No Object). He also co-runs Gong Farm and co-edits Ludd Gang, a bi-monthly magazine set up to support the Poets’ Hardship Fund.

Nell Osborne published her first poetry pamphlet, The Canine Redeemer Has Entered The Bungalow, in 2021 with Just Not. Her most recent pamphlet Thank You For Everything, is published by Monitor Books. Her debut novel is forthcoming with MOIST in September 2025.

James Goodwin‘s most recent book of poetry is Faux Ice, published by Materials in 2022. He lives in London on a narrowboat.

This is a free event, but please RSVP below so we have an idea of numbers.

Please feel free to BYOB.

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ON TONY BENN: Andy Beckett and Melissa Benn in Conversation
2025-04-29 19:00 - 21:30
To celebrate the long-awaited publication of Tony Benn’s political writings, as well as the paperback edition of The Searchers, we welcome Andy Beckett and Melissa Benn to the shop for a conversation on Benn, his fellow Labour renegades and the future of the Labour left.

We are delighted to be welcoming Melissa Benn to the shop to the celebrate the centenary anthology of her father Tony Benn’s speeches, writings and interviews. The book is a timely reminder of his political potency and the urgency of his agenda across a wide set of issues: the consequences of empire, the need to embrace industrial change, reform of the state machine and the management of politics. Joining Melissa we have Andy Beckett, journalist for The Guardian, The Economist and The London Review of Books. We also be launching the paperback edition of Andy’s brilliant book The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, a book about Benn and the Labour Left politicians he collaborated with and inspired.

Advanced booking strongly recommended. Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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BOOK TALK: SQUATTING LONDON with Samuel Burgum
2025-04-30 19:00 - 20:30
Squatting in London has a rich and diverse history. Today, squatters live a marginalised, stigmatised and criminalised existence, yet they persist. Behind the glittering façade of shiny new buildings, London is a network of vacant offices, boarded-up shops and dilapidated pubs that host some of the city’s poorest and most determined citizens, exiled and increasingly pushed to the margins.

We are very excited to welcome Samuel Burgum to Housmans to talk about his vital new book about a facinating, and much neglected, part of our urban history. Squatting London: The Politics of Property is an account of the real lives of the city’s squatters: their ambitions and struggles. Squatting is a challenge to the logic of property which underpins the city. By finding refuge, staying put, creating spaces and participating in counter-cultures, squats are political acts. They sit in direct opposition to the speculation, gentrification and regeneration that controls London today.

From wasted office blocks transformed into a life-saving homeless shelter, to temporary art exhibitions and raves; from an empty doctor’s surgery, to a library closed by cuts; from mutual aid networks set up during the pandemic, to restaurants, shops, offices and pubs – Squatting London is an alternative, underground and rebellious ethnographic account of a city you thought you already knew.

Samuel Burgum is an urban sociologist, currently conducting a Leverhulme-sponsored ethnographic project on squatting in the context of the UK’s housing crisis. He is the author of Occupying London: Post-Crash Resistance and the Limits of Possibility. He has written for various journals, including Antipode, The Sociological Review and Journal for Cultural Research.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + event entry’ or ‘special bundle’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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The Politics of Motherhood: Alex Bollen & Helen Charman in conversation
2025-05-21 19:00 - 20:30
We are very excited to welcome two brilliant contemporary feminist thinkers to Housmans; their projects address ‘motherhood’ and the figure of the mother, as the urgent political categories that they are.

Alex Bollen is a Postnatal Practitioner with the National Childbirth Trust and researcher with over 20 years of experiance, in Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths she picks apart the pernicious histories of what she refers to as ‘Good Mother Myths.’ These myths are deployed to censure mothers and blame them for society’s problems. Incensed by the way bad science is used to shame mothers, she decided to set the record straight. With meticulous research and keen insight, Motherdom exposes both the shaky science and unjustified prescriptions about how mothers should ‘naturally’ behave. Competing visions of birth – ‘natural’ versus ‘medical’ – mean women can be criticised whatever happens, raising the odds that birth will be a damaging, even deadly, experience. Mothers are judged and belittled whether they breast- or bottle-feed their babies. Bogus claims about brain development and dodgy attachment theories mean that whatever mothers do, it is never enough. This must stop, she says. We must replace Good Mother myths with a realistic approach to parenting. Alex Bollen proposes ‘motherdom’, a more expansive conception of motherhood, which values and respects the different ways people raise their children. Instead of finding fault with mothers, Motherdom shifts our focus to the relationships and resources children need to flourish.

Alex will be in conversation with Helen Charman whose book Mother State, not even out in paperback yet, already has a well deserved reputation as one of the major works of Marxist-Feminist thinking produced this decade. In it, Helen argues that motherhood must be conceived within poltical terms and that we must take a wider historically cohesive view of the figure of the mother, who is both monstered, and legislated againist, by the state, whilst also being held up as sort of ideal of reactionary political femininity. From the blurb: “In Mother State, Helen Charman writes a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women’s Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers’ fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them too. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. ‘Mother’ ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.”

Advanced booking strongly recommended.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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Book Launch: Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files by Kate Wilson
2025-05-30 19:00 - 20:30
‘It was exciting when it started, then comfortable and domestic, and over time we grew apart. If it had been real, our relationship wouldn’t have made a chapter in a memoir. But Mark was a fictional character, contrived by the British state to violate me and undermine the values I held dearest. And the entire time, EN31 was sitting around the corner, writing it all down, watching our lives unfold.’

In 2003, British police infiltrated a group of young activists, forming sexual relationships and spying without warrant on hundreds of innocent civilians. Kate Wilson fought back. She took the Met to court, at times battling alone without funding or legal representation, enduring bullying, psychological intrusion and further state surveillance. It took her nearly twenty years to uncover the eerie truth about Britain’ s secret political police.

Kate will be joining us at Housmans to tell her story. This is an extremely important event us as Housmans itself has been home to many groups infiltrated and spied on by undercover police officers.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7pm

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BOOK LAUNCH: Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation by Juliana Gleeson
2025-06-09 19:00 - 20:30
We are delighted to be welcoming Juliana Gleeson, one of the co-editors of the much acclaimed Transgender Marxism, back to Housmans to celebrate the publication of her new book: Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation. In this work, Gleeson examines the history of the Intersex Liberation Movement, and reveals the means by which it interrogated systemic medical abuses of intersex people and reshaped our understanding of ‘sex.’ Blending philosophical insights and personal testimonies, Gleeson argues that intersex people have been harmed not just for therapeutic reasons but to ease professional and parental anxieties.

Juliana will be in conversation with the philosopher Billie Cashmore. They will talk for around 45 minutes or so, followed by an audience Q&A.

Our Speakers:

Juliana Gleeson is a writer, comedian and historian. She has published essays in outlets including Viewpoint Magazine, Invert Journal and VICE, and performed internationally at a wide range of communist and queer cultural events. She is the co-editor of Transgender Marxism.

Billie Cashmore is a PhD student in Philosophy at Kingston University. Her work is on the challenge posed to philosophy by the Black Radical Tradition, particularly concerning the concepts of value, narrative and relation. Her first book We Hear Only Ourselves was published by Zer0 Books in 2023.

Advanced booking strongly recommended.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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BOOK LAUNCH: EVERY MONUMENT WILL FALL: Dan Hicks in conversation with Dr Mai Musié & Onyekachi Wambu
2025-06-11 19:00 - 20:30
Every Monument Will Fall: A Story Of Remembering And Forgetting

‘An extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource’ — Paul Gilroy

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities – and one that has a deeper history than you might think.

We are delighted to welcome Professor Dan Hicks back to Housmans to discuss his incredible new book Every Monument Will Fall: A Story Of Remembering And Forgetting, a beautifully written, polemical but generous work. Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums – including the Pitt Rivers Museum, where he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford – revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

OUR SPEAKERS:

Dan Hicks MA (Oxon), PhD, FSA, MCIfA (born 1972) is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan works on the material and visual culture of the human past, up to and including the modern, colonial, contemporary and digital worlds, and on the history of Archaeology, Anthropology Art, and Architecture. His curatorial work has ranged widely, and has included the co-curated exhibition and book Lande: the Calais “Jungle” and Beyond in 2019 and Victor Ehikhamenor at St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 2022. You can read a 2025 interview about his background, career and writing on the Society of Antiquaties of London website here.

Dan’s latest book is Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting, published with Penguin (Hutchinson Heinemann), and he also recorded the audio book for Every Monument Will Fall.

Dan has published nine authored and edited books, and has written articles, essays and op-eds for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, for a wide range of audiences: from the Times Literary Supplement to The Art Newspaper, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Artnet, Architectural Review, Frieze Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent. Dan has regularly appeared on live Radio and TV news and in documentaries, including BBC News at Ten, Channel 4 News, Sky News, LBC, Times Radio, and BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, The Moral Maze, The World Tonight, Front Row, The Today Programme and Making History.

Dr Mai Musié’s research focuses on race and ethnicity in the ancient world. She is also interested in medieval manuscripts, particularly from Ethiopian-Eritrean traditions. She is passionate about exploring the interconnectivity between the ancient Mediterranean world and North-East Africa.

​Mai arrived in the UK aged 8 as a child refugee of the Ethiopian-Eritrean civil war. As a young child she spent many happy days in South Lambeth Tate Library exploring stories written about the ancient world, particularly Greek myths. Mai went on to study Classical Civilisation at university and forged a career in engaging the public with the ancient and medieval world.

Onyekachi Wambu is a respected writer and journalist. He was born in Nigeria in 1960 and arrived in Britain after the Biafran War. In the late 1980s he edited the Voice newspaper, and has directed documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and PBS. He is the Executive Director of the African Foundation for Development. His most recent book, Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 Years & More of the Black British Experience, was published in 2023. Onyekachi is also currently working with the All Party-Parliamentary Group on Afrikan-Reparations which in March 2025 published the Laying Ancestors to Rest Policy Brief.

Advanced booking strongly recommended.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

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Book talk: Drax of Drax Hall with Paul Lashmar
2025-06-18 19:00 - 20:30
How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery

We are delighted that celebrated journalist Paul Lashmar will be joining us for an evening at Housmans to discuss his latest book, Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery. A brilliantly detailed and probing study of a how powerful British family came by their wealth through the worst kind of brutal, dehumanising violence.

With a forward by David Olusoga, this book, which spans 400 years and 18 generations, tells a story that has never been told. While all the British landed gentry profited from chattel slavery in the West Indies, the Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax family of Dorset pioneered it.

It all started when James Drax, one of the first settlers in Barbados in 1627, effectively founded the British sugar industry. His descendants went on to write the book on how to run a slave plantation. For more than two hundred years, the family enslaved up to 330 people at any time and became enormously rich. Today, the bloodline is unbroken, and former Tory MP Richard Drax heads the family from his vast Charborough Estate in Dorset. With physical assets worth at least £150m—not to mention the 621-acre sugar plantation in Barbados, the Drax Hall Estate—he was the wealthiest landowner in the House of Commons. Unseated in 2024, he remains a hero amongst hard-right culture warriors for his refusal to make any reparations for his family’s role in slavery.

Drax of Drax Hall lifts the lid on the grotesque history of this family. Through enclosure at home and enslavement abroad, their exploits expose the ugly realities of colonialism and empire—the legacies of which we have yet to fully confront today.

Paul Lashmar is Reader in Journalism at City St George’s, University of London. He has taken an interest in the history of slavery since he developed a Channel 4 series on Britain’s slave trade in 1999. He has been an investigative journalist in television and print, and on the staff of The Observer, Granada Television’s World in Action current affairs series and The Independent. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of six books. He lives in Dorset.

Advanced Booking Strongly Recommended.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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POETRY READING: Briony Hughes launches SPECULATIVE FREQUENCIES
2025-06-19 19:00 - 21:00
We are excited to welcome the daring and innovative poetry press Permeable Barrier back to Housmans and help them launch their sophomore publication: Speculative Frequencies by Briony Hughes.

​In this invigorating new collection, Briony Hughes uses her experiences tracking bats through the Surrey Hills as a means to expand ‘communication’ beyond the human body. The bat as a cultural figure is small, blind, nocturnal, and occasionally sinister, but in Hughes’ poems they become a medium through which to interrogate the most pressing issues of our time; what happens when we abandon concepts of human exceptionalism and see ourselves as animals existing with other animals within an ecosystem? In a book of innovative engagements with language and visuality, Hughes explores the enmeshment of humanity within the natural world, and finds a moving kinship with these exceptional, easily overlooked creatures.

“The connection is there; it has been all along, but the poet boils it to our surface, dear reader. This collection by Briony Hughes is a masterpiece in feeling the majesty of other creatures vibrating on our skin. Feel the tabbing tapping through a tooth! I love this book!”

CAConrad

“Where Nagel gave up on answering the question of what it is like to be a bat, Briony Hughes leans in. This is a poet who sound-sees, who turns the page into a night sky aflutter with creaturely life. Speculative Frequencies is at once an experimental field guide, playful eco-survey and love poem to the more-than-human world.“

Isabel Galleymore

“Think in diameters! Information must come to the intelligence from all the senses’ wrote Thomas A. Clark and this seemingly simple phrase speaks to what is happening in Briony Hughes’ Speculative Frequencies, her intelligent, sensual book of bats. Sound, as we might expect, is key, a tapping, tabbing, pipping, pitting, batting against the ear through the echolocator onto the retro typewriter, a human/machine/bat conversation that can never keep up but is suggestively, erotically, embodied onto the page a la Charles Olson and/or Maggie O’Sullivan. Other pages evoke the concrete works of Cobbing and Morgan in their repetitive play on key bat/habitat words: ‘Repeat until the poem staggers’. The antecedents are visible, but the work is quirkily original, and also funny especially when Hughes gets to the ‘Index’, the ‘information’ bit. It isn’t always clear who is speaking/listening and to whom in this work of shifty pronouns and thus the tentative, playful and mysterious air of the project is sustained throughout this speculative text.”

Harriet Tarlo

Briony will be joined by guest readers Sarah Westcott, Robin Boothroyd, and Redell Olsen.

This is a free event, but we ask that you RSVP below.

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BOOK LAUNCH: REMEMBERING WOMEN by Christine Lehnen
2025-06-25 19:00 - 20:30
Women do have a history of their own. All we need to do is remember it.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Christine Lehnen to Housmans to discuss her illuminating new investigation, Remembering Women, that looks back at our collective memory to explore the myriad ways that women in the past have enjoyed a more egalitarian life

Due to advances in bioarchaeological methods, scientists have discovered that one out of three women in Ancient Scythia was an active warrior buried with her weapons. Far from being confined to their homes, these women rode out to hunt, travelled to distance places, or used weapons to fend off their enemies. These warriors were no exceptions to the rule, with women enjoying a significantly higher degree of equality than their Greek contemporaries.

Remembering Women argues that there is a historical precedent for a fairer society. From reappraisals of well-known objects such as the earliest human bone calendars from the Stone Age to revelatory findings of innovative bioarcheological methods used on human remains from Ancient Scythia, evidence is accumulating that there were places in the past where all women were allowed to thrive.

Interweaving new findings from archaeology with the stories of her mother and grandmothers, as well as her everyday experiences as a woman living today, Lehnen explores our collective memory of women and argues that it needs to change if we are to create an egalitarian society. Remembering Women follows the traces left in the material, literary, and archaeological record by our foremothers, and their heirlooms, artwork and stories, to take a fresh look at our life in the present.

Christine will be joined in conversation by the writer and wild-swimmer Emma Simpson, author of Breaking Waves. They will be in conversation for around 45 minutes to an hour, followed by a Q&A.

Our Speakers:

CHRISTINE LEHNEN is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. She is a regular contributor on feminism, culture, history, archaeology and public memoryfor outlets such as Aeon, Psyche, The Wire, Antigone, New Lines, Magazine, and Deutsche Welle.

EMMA SIMPSON is a wild swimmer and writer specialising in narrative non-fiction. Having spent a couple of decades being distracted by a career as an air traffic controller and experiencing two life-wrenching events, she rediscovered her pen and passion for storytelling at the same time as discovering how transformational cold-water swimming was for hert health, wellbeing, and sense of connection with the world. She explores these themes in her compelling, moving book Breaking Waves.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

PLEASE NOTE: Our website has been malfunctioning and we are currently unable to sell tickets through it. For the time being events will be free but please RSVP using the link below. Please only RSVP if you are certain to come to the event, as we need to keep a cap on the volume of attendees for health and safety reasons.

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SOLD OUT: Friends in Common by Laura C. Forster and Joel White
2025-07-01 19:00 - 20:30
Housmans are delighted to be welcoming Laura C. Forster and Joel White to the shop for a dicussion of their wonderful, exhilarting book on the radical potential of friendship!

Friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. Friends in Common explores friendship as a radical practice, capable of upending hierarchies and producing social change.Friendship can transcend social boundaries and political borders. It is vital in building communities and underpinning solidarity. But its transformative potency ensures that it is heavily policed and restrained by the state. Understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work and politics, and show us new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape. The dissonance created by comparing societal expectations around friendship and a lonely reality, especially in the wake of an isolating global pandemic, is deeply alienating. Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and is the antidote to capitalist despair.

Laura and Joel will talk us through the book and its major themes and arguments for around 45 minutes, followed by an audience Q&A.

Our Speakers:

Laura C. Forster is a writer and historian based in Newcastle. She is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, and has written for Tribune, ROAR, and DOPE.

Joel White is a writer and campaigner based in Glasgow. His writing has appeared in Tribune, the LRB Blog, Radical Philosophy, The Guardian, and The Wire.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

THIS EVENT HAS NOW SOLD OUT. Please call us or email shop@housmans.com to be added to the waitlist.

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POETRY READING: Pamemar Press x Tripwire Journal Leslie Kaplan translations
2025-07-05 19:00 - 20:30
We are very excited to be welcoming our friends Tripwire Journal [who are joining us all the way from California!] and Pamenar Press to celebrate the work of a very important writer indeed: Leslie Kaplan. We are very lucky to be hosting the launch of TWO Kaplan books available in English for the first time.

The French poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in all three genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L’exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018 Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. This was the first English language edition of the book.

Now, from Pamenar Press we have the first English edition of The Book of Skies, also translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. Like its predecessor Excess—The Factory this collection emerged from Kaplan’s experience of participating in the national strike and social revolution of 1968 in France. Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. Excess—the Factory famously put the factory experience on the page in sparse and original language. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after ‘68 as the speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. As the speaker moves from site to site, she finds possibility within the social spaces of the market, the street, the café, and even the factory itself. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating.

Alongside this, we are delighted that our comrade David Buuk from Tripwire will be joining us to launch a new English edition of Kaplan’s novella, Miss Nobody Knowsp; about the lived aftermath of May ’68: its hopes and failures and how they continue to resonate today.A book described by Jean-Luc Godard as ‘so strong and graceful, so… so… so… as if the novel were suspended between the animal and the human.”

“Ostensibly about the May ’68 strike and a man who cannot deal with its aftermath, but really a love story to these moments when suddenly the utopian comes into view and no longer feels impossible. It’s a book to read right now so as to remember that there have been moments when people come together in the name of possibility, rather than in rage.” —Juliana Spahr

This is a free event but please RSVP using the link below. BYOB.

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BOOK TALK: YOUR LIFE IS NOT A (FUCKING) STORY with Simon Critchley
2025-07-09 19:00 - 20:30
Housmans are delighted to welcome Simon Critchley to the shop to discuss a new volume of essays, ‘Your Life Is Not a (Fucking) Story‘ published by everyday analysis. In this collection of his recent articles, Critchley – one of the most important living philosophers – takes us through his reflections on death, questions of doubt and reason, the legacy of David Bowie, the nature of fear and empathy in a broken society and a critique of narrative identity – among other things. Your Life Is Not a Story explores the contemporary world and its psychological impact on us, offering us a way to see our situation different and resist its tricks and contrivances.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

This is a free event.

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CANCELED: CARCERAL APARTHEID: Brittany Friedman in conversation with Ali Meghji
2025-07-16 19:00 - 20:30
Please note this has event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
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POETRY READING: GHAYATH ALMADHOUN AND LOTTE L.S.
2025-07-21 19:00 - 21:30
We welcome the Syrian-Palestinian Ghayath Almadhoun to the shop to read from his incredible collection I HAVE BROUGHT YOU A SEVERED HAND, reacently translated into English by Catherine Cobham and published by Divided Publishing.

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, straight lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

Reading alongside him, and joining him in discussion we have Lotte L.S. one of the finest British poets working today in a radical left tradition.

This is a free event, but we ask that you RSVP using the link below. Drinks will be available, but please do feel free to BYOB.

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BOOK LAUNCH: FASCIST YOGA with STEWART HOME
2025-07-26 19:00 - 20:30
We are very, very, very exited to be welcoming the dazzling provocateur, artist and all-round London legend STEWART HOME back to Housmans to talk about his latest book, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness, a dazzling exposé on the violent politics and occultic fascism that underpins much of the history of contemporary yoga. As ever, Stewart Home shows that nothing is sacred.

The practice of yoga promises peace, self-realisation and release, thanks to the power of its ‘mystic’ Indian origins. But what if this is just hype? In Fascist Yoga, Stewart Home sweeps away the half-truths to tell a new origin story of the world’s first modern yogi – a Californian escapologist who added some Hindu fairy dust to gym and circus exercises.

Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise. From cult leaders to brainwashed followers, TV celebrities and fake gurus, the story of yoga has involved some of the strangest currents of humanity.

Today, the COVID pandemic has activated elements within the modern yoga movement to espouse far-right conspiracies, and QAnon’s fascist political programmes mirror some of yoga’s key early proponents.

Interviewing Stewart about the book we have the legendary poet Sascha Aurora Akhtar! Sascha was born in Pakistan. Since that was obviously a mistake, she fled as soon as possible to an environment where women could be wacky. What was born was a hydra. Each head a different medium, via which to transmit her wyrd and whimsical witchery. She graduated from Bennington College in 1999. She has written all too many poems, out of which some have managed to become titled collections. Her films include Ana-el-Haqq (2002) and The Sea and Medusa (2006). In 2003 she received a fellowship from the Creative Writing department at UMASS Amherst where she worked with James Tate, Sabina Murray and Peter Gizzi. In 2005 and 2006, she performed in Butoh-based dance pieces at Chisenhale Dance Space in London. She recently was part of a year-long initiative by the International Museum of Women in San Francisco, exhibiting work by women artists from around the globe. Her photographic work was on display at Gallery 27 on Cork Street in September 2007 and an exhibition of her works is upcoming in Spring 2008 at The Commune in Karachi, Pakistan. She spends her time in London and Pakistan and is the co-producer of the successful La Langoustine Est Morte reading series.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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Book Launch: THREE REVOLUTIONS: Simon Hall in conversation with Owen Hatherley
2025-07-29 19:00 - 20:30
Simon Hall and Owen Hatherley will be joining us to discuss Simon’s fascinating new book, THREE REVOLUTIONS: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys That Changed The World.

From the streets of Petrograd during the heady autumn of 1917, to Mao’s stunning victory in October 1949, and Fidel’s triumphant arrival in Havana, in January 1959, the history of the twentieth century was transformed in dramatic and profound ways by the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.

In Three Revolutions, the stories of these epoch-defining events are told together for the first time. At the heart of each revolution was an epic journey: Lenin’s 1917 return to Russia from exile in Switzerland; Mao’s ‘Long March’ of 1934–35, covering some 6,000 miles across China; and Fidel Castro’s return to Cuba in 1956 following his exile in Mexico. Told in tandem with these are the corresponding journeys of three extraordinary journalists – John Reed, Edgar Snow and Herbert L. Matthews – whose electric testimony from the frontlines of each revolution would make a decisive contribution to how these revolutions were understood in the wider world.

Here, in Simon Hall’s masterful retelling, these six remarkable journeys are brought vividly to life. Featuring a stellar cast, extraordinary drama and an epic sweep, Three Revolutions raises fundamental questions about the nature of political power, the limits of idealism and the role of the journalist – questions that remain of utmost urgency today.

Our Speakers:

Simon Hall is the Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds. He previously studied at Sheffield and Cambridge, and held a Fox International Fellowship at Yale. His previous books include 1956: The World in Revolt and Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.

Owen Hatherley is the author of many books on aesthetics and politics, including Landscapes of Communism, Trans-Europe Express and Modern Buildings in Britain. His latest book, The Alienation Effect explores how Central European Émigrés transformed Britain in the 20th century. He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin.

Advanced Booking Strongly Recommended.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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BOOK LAUNCH: A Social History of Analytic Philosophy with Christoph Schuringa
2025-07-30 19:00 - 20:30
‘Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy achieves the impossible: while it follows a clear line of interpretation – analytic philosophy is not politically neutral, it is deeply rooted in capitalist liberalism and its struggle against Leftist engagement -, it develops this line in a vast and complex narrative full of fascinating historical and personal details, from the Cambridge beginnings of analytic thought (Russell, Moore) through the key role of analytic philosophy in McCarthy purges up to how analytic approach was crucial in including anti-colonial and feminist orientations into the liberal frame (Appiah). Schuringa’s book is unputdownable – applied to it, this term is not a cliché but a simple description of its effect on a reader.‘

– Slavoj Žižek

In the English speaking world, self-described ‘analytic philosophy’ has become the predominant method of philosophical inquiry, at least within the majority of university philosophy departments. By some, it is celebrated for it’s exhalting of rigorousness and pursuit ‘the empirical.’ Others find these theoretical claims to be dubious and naieve. Christoph Schuringa, in its brilliantly argued book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, argues that the enduring power of analytic philosophy can only be understood by examining its social history. The mode tends to think of itself as concerned with eternal questions, transcending the changing scenes of history. It thinks of itself as apolitical. Schuringa, however, convincingly shows that the opposite is true.

The origins of analytic philosophy are in a set of distinct movements, shaped by highly specific sets of political and social forces. Only after the Second World War were these disparate, often dynamic movements joined together to make ‘analytic philosophy’ as we know it. In the climate of McCarthyism, analytic philosophy was robbed of political force.

To this day, analytic philosophy is the ideology of the status quo. It may seem arcane and largely removed from the real world, but it is a crucial component in upholding liberalism, through its central role in elite educational institutions. As Schuringa concludes, the apparently increasing friendliness of analytic philosophers to rival approaches in philosophy should be understood as a form of colonization; thanks to its hegemonic status, it reformats all it touches in service of its own imperatives, going so far as to colonize decolonial efforts in the discipline.

Christoph Schuringa studied philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely on the history of philosophy and on Marx and Marxism, and is associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University, London. He is Editor of the Hegel Bulletin, and his writing has appeared in Jacobin, New Left Review, European Journal of Philosophy and elsewhere.

He will be joined in conversation with Jonathan Egid, lecturer in Philosophy at SOAS. Jonathan recently completed my PhD at King’s College London on the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship. Beyond the aim of clarifying this intractable debate, and bringing neglected works to a wider audience, Jonathan is interested in thinking about different ways of writing the history of philosophy, in particular what a truly global history of philosophy would look like.

The two will talk for around 45 minutes to 1 hour, followed by a Q&A. Please do feel free to bring your own drinks.

Doors open at 6:45, talk starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

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POETRY READING: DOM HALE LAUNCHES FIRST NETTLES
2025-08-01 19:00 - 21:30
We are delighted to welcome back to the shop Dom Hale; a co-organiser of the Poets Hardship Fund, publishing great work at Chaff and one of our finest poets. Dom will be launching his new collection ‘First Nettles’ published by The Last Books. Joining Dom we have Fred Spoliar, Paige Murphy, Luke Roberts, Andrew Spragg and Katy Lewis Hood.

THIS IS A FREE EVENT. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO BYOB.

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Autonomy Now present 'Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority' with Paul Dobraszczyk
2025-09-04 19:00 - 20:30
Autonomy Now host ‘Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority’ with Paul DobraszczykWe welcome Paul Dobraszczyk to discuss anarchist architecture, that is, forms of design and building that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the 19th century. These are autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organisation through direct democracy. As the Paul’s recent book on the topic shows, there are a vast range of architectural projects that can been seen to reflect some or all of these values, whether they are acknowledged as specifically anarchist or otherwise.

Anarchist values are evident in projects that grow out of romantic notions of escape – from isolated cabins to intentional communities. Yet, in contrast, they also manifest in direct action – occupations or protests that produce micro-countercommunities. Artists also produce anarchist architecture – intimations of much freer forms of building cut loose from the demands of moneyed clients; so do architects and planners who want to involve users in a process normally restricted to an elite few. Others also imagine new social realities through speculative proposals. Finally, building without authority is, for some, a necessity – the thousands of migrants denied their right to become citizens, even as they have to live somewhere; or the unhoused of otherwise affluent cities forced to build improvised homes for themselves.

The result is to significantly broaden existing ideas about what might constitute anarchism in architecture and also to argue strongly for its nurturing in the built environment. Understood in this way, anarchism offers a powerful way of reconceptualising architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological and egalitarian practice.

About the authorPaul Dobraszczyk is a teaching fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He is the author of Future Cities: Architecture & the Imagination (2019); The Dead City: Urban Ruins & the Spectacle of Decay (2017); Iron, Ornament & Architecture in Victorian Britain (2014); London’s Sewer (2014); and Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (2009); amongst others.Paul’s beautiful book Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority was publihes by Paul Holberton Publishing in 2021 and will be available on the night.

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Book launch + Exhibition: 'WE REFUSE: SAYING NO TO THE ARMY IN ISRAEL' with Martin Barzilai
2025-09-05 19:00 - 20:30
Housmans warmly welcomes Martin Barzilai, who will be coming from Paris especially for this launch event, to discuss his book of interviews with refuzeniks, conscientious objectors and dissidents, who have refused to join Israel’s conscription army, the Israel Defence Force (IDF).It takes some courage to refuse to serve in an army, when people all around you support it. Yet some Israeli men and women, young and old, make that choice. The young are forced to justify themselves in front of multiple army interrogators without any support. Their elders, some of them ex-officers, tell comrades why they cannot continue to carry out intimidation, destruction, and killing in the West Bank and Gaza.

Persons from under 20, to over 60 tell of their particular experience; each one adds nuance and insight to the dominant culture within Israel. They tell us about their circumstances, the government and army, and their hopes for something different. Their critical perspectives offer a challenge to the views and news that comes to us through the official Israeli media.Martin is a photographer, and there will be a display of his photographs related to the book, exhibited at Housmans from September 5th onwards. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: martin-barzilai.com

Martin Barzilai was born in Montevideo (Uruguay). He has a diploma in photography from Paris’s École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière. His first interests are in the historical, political and social problems of his continent of origin. He has also completed several photo reportages on themes in Greece, France, Tunisia and in Israel/Palestine (New York Times, Rolling Stone, Le Monde, 6 Mois, CQFD…). Between 2010 and 2015, he worked with the co-operative Sub.coop (Argentina). He worked with them on the Huis clos project (presented at the Getty Center, Los Angeles among other places). In 2017, he published Refuzniks : Dire non à l’armée en Israel, with Libertalia publishers, and next, in 2023, Cimetière fantôme – Thessalonique with the Editions Créaphis publishing house, and with the support of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah. Having taught photography in Barcelona and Buenos Aires, he now lives in Paris.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

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Autonomy Now present ‘Anarcho-Punk: Music and Resistance in London 1977-1988' with David Insurrection and Tony Drayton
2025-09-13 19:00 - 20:30
Anarcho-Punk: Music and Resistance in London 1977-1988 with David Insurrection and Tony Drayton

We welcome David Insurrection to tell the story of an oft overlooked scene. Anarcho-punk in the 1980s truly rocked the boat. Much more than music it set out to change the world and in a not insignificant way did just that. It inspired a generation of activists, artists and musicians to take up the fight for a better fairer world. They tore down the walls. The Sex Pistols may have opened the door but the Crass punks charged through it. This is their story. As we return to the embattled 1970s and 1980s David takes us on a journey where we visit some of the scene’s most significant locations and hot spots, to places where change mattered and the spirit of revolt burned brightest. David will be in duscission with Tony Drayton of the infamous ‘Kill Your Pet Puppy’ punk zine and now blog at https://killyourpetpuppy.co.uk

The title of the book for me says everything – everything that we gave our soul to during those years. This book does a fantastic job at retelling that story.Col Latter (Flux of Pink Indians)

This is a well-researched psychogeographical report on the anarcho-punk squatting scene in London in the late 70s and early 80s.Tom Vague (Vague)

David Insurrection’s opus on the anarchist years that led to a movement of such creative force that remains unparalleled in our history, a moment captured for all time by a witness in words and with passion.Chris Ward (Wet Paint Theatre Company)

About the author:

David Insurrection was born in 1962 and raised in NE Scotland. He’s married with one daughter. At the age of 17 in the autumn of 1979 he discovered punk rock. It would leave a lasting impression on him. In 1980 he first heard Crass. That experience changed everything and would determine the direction his life took from that point onwards.In 1984 he began to identify as an anarchist and took his first activist steps. By this time he had immersed himself in everything anarcho-punk. In 1988 he produced his first zine. His next zine in 1990 was called Insurrection. In 1993 he moved to London. He stayed there for four and a half years returning to his native Scotland in 1997. It was during his stay in London that he first got a hankering for writing a book on anarcho-punk. He’s still involved in the scene to this day.

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Book Talk: THE MERCY STEP: Marcia Hutchinson in conversation with Mel Pennant
2025-09-17 19:00 - 20:30
Gosh this is an exciting one! Join us for a wonderful evening with two incredible authors from the Windrush generation: Marcia Hutchinson and Mel Pennant. The two will be discussing Marcia’s fantastic recent novel, The Mercy Step.

Bradford, December 1962. A precocious Mercy makes her reluctant entrance into the world, torn from the warm embrace of her mother’s womb, to a chaotic household that seems to have no place for her. Her siblings do not understand her, her mother’s attention is given to the Church, and the entire family lives at the whims of her father’s quick temper.

Left to herself, Mercy finds solace in books, her imagination, and the quiet comfort of her faithful toy, Dolly. But escapism has its limits, and as the grip of family, faith and fear threatens to close in, Mercy learns she must act if she wants a different future; one where she is seen, heard, and her family set free.

The Mercy Step is a sharply-witted and tender portrait of a young girl’s quiet rebellion, and her refusal to be broken.

Marcia and Mel will read from and discuss the book for around 45 minutes-1hr followed by a Q&A. Expect conversations around the Black British Experience, women’s writing and Britain in the 60s! Hope to see you there.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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BOOK TALK: ENGLAND'S MILITARY HEARTLAND
2025-09-24 19:00 - 20:30
‘A thoughtful and human account of the enmeshment of the military into the landscapes of everyday life […] As we enter a renewed phase of militarised geo-politics, this work becomes more urgent than ever.’— Gargi Bhattacharyya, Director of the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation

In association with King’s College London, Housmans are delighted to host a talk around an essential new book: ENGLAND’S MILITARY HEARTLAND: Preparing for War on Salisbury Plain. This wonderful, alarming and brilliantly written book explores the vital, but underdiscussed, interrelations between British military and civic life.

During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the armed forces became increasingly visible – partly due to public alarm at the number of fatalities but also as a result of interventions by government, media and military leaders. Today the world is undergoing a terrifying arms race in which powerful arms companies are competing to produce new generations of killing technology, including AI and nuclear weapons. Many people feel powerless to stop their governments spending more and more on defence, and being complicit in ongoing war crimes.

In all this it’s important to remember that the military are a public institution and depend on taxpayers. The public has a right to understand the costs and consequences of maintaining a labour force for war-fighting, especially one that works closely with major arms companies and contributes heavily to global carbon emissions.

ENGLAND’S MILITARY HEARTLAND introduces a ten-year investigation of the military training area on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England and explores what it means to live next to a military base. The book questions how war blurs the boundaries between military and civilian, and what can or cannot be addressed by the use of lethal violence, sanctioned and organised by the state. To explore this we bring together a group of scholars and activists, working on land justice and military ecological damage, to think about how we resist the drive to war at home.

What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? England’s military heartland provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide.

Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK’s global defence estate, the Salisbury ‘super garrison’ offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment: as well as being the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are home to rare plants and wildlife.

How does the army take responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Are its claims that its presence is a positive for the environment anything more than propaganda? This book investigates these questions against the backdrop of a historic landscape inscribed with the legacy of perpetual war.

Urgent, important, and poignantly recounted.’— Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade

‘Exposes the remarkable extent to which militarisation is shaping not only the lives of humans, but the character and quality of the land on which they and other creatures live.’— Cynthia Enloe, author of Twelve Feminist Lessons of War

OUR SPEAKERS:

Saskia Papadakis is a social researcher with expertise in the UK environmental movement, anti-racism and British Black Power, and socio-spatial inequalities in the UK. She organises across grassroots migrants’ rights groups in London.

Antonia Dawes is a lecturer and writer at King’s College London. She works on racism, antiracism and cultural theory. Her first book Race Talk (2020) is about race and racism in southern Italy. At this event she will speak on her new book England’s Military Heartland, co-authored with Vron Ware, Mitra Pariyar and Alice Cree.

Khem Rogaly researches the political economy of the military and its role in climate crisis. His most recent report for the thinktank Common Wealth explored the potential for a just transition away from military production through interviews with workers. He will speak about the Khaki Economy in England’s Military Heartland in relation to the escalating arms race today.

Rachael Milliner is a member of the Museum of Enclosure, an emergent, itinerant, internationalist, political education project collecting oral histories of dispossession in England. Representing the project, they will discuss how access to enclosed and militarised land is vital to performing memory work and relational accountability, calling for further interventions in dominant British property culture.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

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