Carl Kears

‘The need for support is everywhere’: working-class arts group expands to north of England The Working Arts Club is working to counter the stark class disparity within the UK creative sector

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Understanding the UK’s asbestos disaster | Confront Power Profit-hungry industry, complicit governments, and overly bureaucratic unions. Tom White, author of Bad Dust, provides his insights into the UK’s asbestos disaster and why the issues with asbestos ref...

I spoke to Tom Quinn from @confrontpower.bsky.social about my book Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster. Tom has been doing some brilliant investigative work, so I was very happy to contribute!
confrontpower.org/uk-asbestos-...

drive.google.com/file/d/1Nnqa...

These are obviously wonderful poems in their own right. They also take me back with fresh eyes to the OE poems themselves

Good news for a significant collection

This article follows the poet-artist Bill Griffiths to Seaham, Co. Durham, a place that has a long and complex relationship with ‘regeneration’ and ‘rebirth’.

His work shows how predominantly working class
towns have rich but less traditionally documented archives and histories of creative practice and community energy that have long tapped into the medieval past.

And while postwar communal hubs like ‘The Phoenix Inn’ are long gone, with set-ups like Phoenix Vaping, etc., more common these days, Griffiths’ activism, local and living history, and community work in Seaham in the 1990s/2000s are instructive…

So much of Griffiths’ resistance towards private companies and their attempts to have Seaham reborn were rooted in his deep knowledge of the town’s layered history. After the closure of the last pits around Seaham, sites like the 7th/8th C St Mary’s were under threat from regeneration schemes.

This article follows the poet-artist Bill Griffiths to Seaham, Co. Durham, a place that has a long and complex relationship with ‘regeneration’ and ‘rebirth’.

Archiving Voices: Bill Griffiths’ Creative, Scholarly and Activist Practices with the Old English Phoenix in Seaham Abstract. Bill Griffiths (1948–2007) was a poet, publisher, activist and researcher of languages and local history whose work is beginning to attract more

Bill Griffiths and 'The Phoenix' in Seaham: academic.oup.com/english/arti...

And the news is... We're recruiting! Applications are now open for our 2026 @leverhulme.ac.uk Doctoral Scholarships. So, if you want to study at PhD level pre-modern handwritten cultures and the organisation of knowledge and power within them, do investigate our refreshed website.

⬇️🙌🏼⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #Poetry ❤️🥳

In 2025/26 we will again be offering the Maggs Scholarship for our History of the Book MA!

Generously provided by Maggs Books Ltd, this scholarship covers the full cost of home fees.

You can read more about the experience of last year's scholar here: ies.sas.ac.uk/blog/maggs-s...

Viz letter (from a good few years ago) reading as follows: "I love pies, and in 1940 I joined a monastery because I was told I could leave a very pious lifestyle. What a load of bollocks. I've spent almost seven decades with no trousers or socks, praising God and shit and puling on a bastard rope to ring a fucking bell. If that wasn't arseache enough, they wake me up at four in the morning to chant and tend a fucking beehive. As for pies, there hasn't been a sniff of one since the day I joined. All we eat is fucking porridge. Brother Dominic Anselm, Brinkburn Priory"