DID YOU KNOW?

Popping up all over the country throughout the 1910’s and 20’s, radical bookshops were typically referred to as ‘Bomb Shops’ due to the relationship between radical politics and anarchism which was washing over Europe at the time. These shops were often run by Irish families, who were not conscripted into the British army during WWI. The associations here between Irish immigrants, Radicalism, and ‘Bombs’, would come to have horrifying repercussions for the country in the latter half of the 20th Century. Similarly, the binaries of Capitalism and Socialism as we know them today were firmly established by the 1930’s, during the Post-War depression. In fact, one can measure the spread of anti-war sentiment through the establishment of these shops. Springing up everywhere from Sheffield, to Weymouth, and Northampton, it is clear that Anti-War sentiment and the desire for Radical change was at an all time high.