Welcome to Rural Radicalism.
I’m Owen Gower. I’m an historian and storyteller. Despite living in the countryside for most of my life I have often, naively, assumed that historical activism was confined to urban areas. At school I was taught about events in Bristol, in Manchester, in London. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve started to learn about the exciting, and often tragic, history of pioneering rural cooperatives, of workers’ rallies in village marketplaces, of agricultural unions, and of countryside anarchist colonies.
In Rural Radicalism I want to find out more about these historical pioneers and to meet today’s countryside changemakers to see how that legacy continues.