At the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 20 May 2025, Professor Katrina Navickas of the University of Hertfordshire will be discussing ‘The development of political processions and protest marches in London, 1780-1939’.

The seminar takes place on 20 May 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Protest marches in central London today usually follow a regular route. Assembling on the Thames Embankment, they march towards Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, to Trafalgar Square or down the Mall to Hyde Park, where a big rally is held. This route has immense political symbolism and significance, following in the footsteps of previous generations of marchers.

Londoners of all political persuasions and social status witnessed or took part in processions at some point in their lives. The Lord Mayor’s parade and local guild processions marked key points in the civic and religious calendar, while royal processions at coronations and jubilees developed in grandeur during the long nineteenth century.

Electoral processions to and from the hustings at Covent Garden, and the ‘chairing of the member’ around the main streets of Westminster (and on boats along the Thames in the case of Middlesex constituency), enabled popular participation in the era before the 1832 Reform Act. Many of these traditions continued as the franchise widened.

However, this route through central London wasn’t always the same as it is today. The choice of streets and meeting places wasn’t regularised until at least the 1870s. Trafalgar Square wasn’t completed until the late 1840s. So before then, political gatherings assembled in various locations on the fringes of urban London such as Copenhagen Fields and St George’s Fields – which were built upon by the mid-nineteenth century.

Political rallies were banned in Hyde Park until members of the Reform League pulled up the railings to gain access in 1866. Ever since, protest march routes through the capital have been subject to debate and negotiation between protesters, government and police.

With the rise of the working-class parliamentary reform movements and trades unions from the 1790s, political processions became a central element of protest. Processions and marches were active claims by the working classes to form part of the wider body politic. Reform processions were a show of representing the ‘people’ to the public. Leaders and orators of the parliamentary reform movement employed the ‘grand entry’ into the city, in the mode not only of successful MPs after an election, but also of military leaders returning home after a victory, or with biblical allusions to Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem. ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ was a popular hymn played by bands at both electoral and radical processions.

Holding a political procession became a fraught process of negotiation between the political group holding the procession, and various overlapping layers of power in the capital, from the magistrates to the home office and sheriff of London. Legislation aimed at the democratic reform movement further shaped the locations and routes of the protests. The 1817 Seditious Meetings Act prohibited political meetings within a mile radius of the palace of Westminster while Parliament was in session. Protest marches, therefore, tended to avoid starting, ending or stopping in this area.

The Westminster Reform Society advertised the route of a procession to protest against the Peterloo Massacre on 1 November 1819, starting at the Crown and Anchor on The Strand to march down Fleet Street to Finsbury Square in the City, a distance of around four kilometres. The demonstration was held while Lord Liverpool’s government was pushing the ‘Six Acts’ through parliament, including another Seditious Meetings Act that prohibited the display of political banners and ensigns at demonstrations.

Procession routes, of all types of political and social composition, began to coalesce from the mid-nineteenth century into regular routes across London. The dominant direction of processions was pulled westwards as the built environment of the capital morphed, and Hyde Park became the main site for rallies.

The processional geography of London further evolved as the city expanded eastwards around the docklands from the mid nineteenth century. The increasing density of population in the East End pulled the start of trades’ processions to meeting sites of Mile End Waste, Stepney Green, and, after its opening, Victoria Park. Trades and unemployed marches in and out of the East End and the docklands intensified as newly formed socialist movements, most notably the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), took up street meetings and marches as key tactics during the severe economic downturn of the late 1880s.

The right to march was hard fought, and political movements asserted agency by claiming routes physically as well as symbolically. The period after the First World War brought new challenges and movements that again brought the right to march debates to the fore of policing and legislation.

Earlier compromises of non-interference were no longer effective. The emergence of the communist movement and violent clashes between police and the unemployed in the 1920s and 1930s continued the conflicts of the earlier decades. Culminating in the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936, the provocative militant marching of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was opposed by a physical and material defence of territory by Jewish and communist communities in the East End. In response, the 1936 Public Order Act was rushed through Parliament and became law on 1 January 1937.

The legislation did not completely interfere with the popular right of assembly and protest. The tensions between protecting the freedom of passage and the liberty of assembly and free speech became inextricably entangled with issues of race, class and national politics for the rest of the twentieth century.

KN

Katrina’s seminar takes place on 20 May 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.