“FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH” – WILD PATHS FESTIVAL 2021

Posted on October 7, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Arts, Community and tagged Artel, Ben Street, Biig Piig, covid 19, Cultural Recovery Funding, Do Nothing, epic studios, featured, Franc Moody, Gonzo's Tea Room, green energy, Jerome Thomas, live music, music, NiNE8, norwich, Norwich Arts Centre, Palace, pandemic, Pip Millet, Pom Poko, Shoe Factory Social Club, Sports Team, St Laurence Church, sustainability, The Wallow, up-cycling, War of Words, Wild Paths Festival.

By Rowan Gavin

Since its foundation in 2019, Wild Paths festival has quickly become Norwich’s premier multi-venue live music event. The hotly anticipated 2021 edition of the festival will take place over four days from October 14th-17th, with headliners including Sports Team, Biig Piig and Palace as well as dozens of other acts playing at over 20 venues across the city. With just over a week to go until the festival began, I spoke to Ben Street, festival founder and director, about his experiences of organising the event.

THE HOLIDAY HOME PARADOX: WE LOVE CORNWALL BUT FEEL COMPELLED TO DESTROY IT

Posted on June 26, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community, Perspectives and tagged Airbnb, coast, Community, conservatives, featured, foodbanks, holiday, home, homeless, house, housing, landlord, padstow, penzance, private housing, st mawes, Tories, uk, Zoopla.

by Sarah Edgcumbe

“Stop whining, you ungrateful inbred bastards, it’s our money that keeps you afloat” or some variant of that sentiment is regularly heard by Cornish people and permanent residents of Cornwall. Particularly in the summer. Particularly when we register our frustration at being priced out of communities we grew up in; at pristine green land being built upon, despite the presence of thousands of empty homes; and particularly when we dare to register our opinion that people are not entitled to as many houses as they like, no matter how wealthy they are. The severe levels of poverty experienced in parts of Cornwall are completely overlooked by wealthy holiday home-owners and the government (the two being far from mutually exclusive). It is hidden from view sufficiently that it will not dirty their holiday photos, it will not visibly encroach upon the sandy beaches or the pristine sea. They can pretend that everybody in Cornwall is as thick as portrayed in the TV show Doc Martin while maintaining a wilful ignorance about the devastating effects their Airbnb accommodation or holiday home is wreaking upon the county they proclaim to love.

NORWICH SHOWS SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE

Posted on June 12, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community, Inter|national, Student and tagged Adat Yeshua Synagogue, Angela Davis, antisemitism, AOC, Apartheid, BDS, colonialism, Cromer, decolonisation, ethnic cleansing, featured, Gaza, genocide, Great Yarmouth, IHRA, imperialism, islamophobia, Jacob Ecclestone, Jerusalem, Jerusalem Declaration, justice, Kill the Bill, liberation, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, norwich, palestine, Palestine solidarity, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, peace, ramallah, Rashida Tlaib, settler colonialism, Sheikh jarrah, solidarity, tiktok, UEA, UEA Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, UEA SU, Welsh language, West Bank, zionism.

By Sean Meleady and Callum James

CN: death, violence, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, racism, ethnic cleansing

Norwich, like many cities and towns across Britain, has seen a number of Palestinian solidarity protests in recent weeks. These protests came in the wake of the latest series of aerial bombardments between Israel and Hamas-controlled Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of 256 Palestinians and 12 Israelis, according to UN figures. The spark for this recent escalation of violence occurred when an Israeli court greenlit eviction proceedings of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, and subsequent peaceful protests were brutally repressed, culminating in attacks by Israeli police on the holy site of Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, which elicited international condemnation.

ADAT YESHUA: PREACHING LOVE IN THE FACE OF HATE

Posted on June 4, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community, Perspectives and tagged Adat Yeshua Synagogue, antisemitism, breakfast club, Christianity, featured, food bank, graffiti, hermeneutics, jesus, Judaism, love, Messianic Judaism, norwich, NR2 Skills Share, religion, respect, scripture, Synagogue, tolerance, vandalism, Yeshua.

By Rabbi Binyamin Sheldrake, of the Adat Yeshua Messianic Synagogue, Norwich

CW: Antisemitism

In many ways we could be forgiven for feeling that the world is in a constant state of flux right now — not just with the pandemic and how that has deeply affected us all, but also in terms of our economy, politics and, in a lesser-known arena possibly, the religious world too. While Messianic Judaism is not a direct by-product of the recent turbulence in the world today, the interest shown in it most certainly is. During the lockdown, the huge numbers of texts, calls and emails we received bore testimony to the exponential growth in interest in this modern (and not so modern) form of Judaism. Some fourteen years ago now, Time Magazine ran an article about an emerging idea that they suggested would go on to fundamentally change the world: that Yeshua was a Jew and nothing else.

ITALY’S FAR-RIGHT ARE INDOCTRINATING SCHOOL CHILDREN

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community, Inter|national and tagged Casapound, education, far-right, featured, Fratelli d'Italia, Giorgia Meloni, Italian politics, Italy, Matteo Salvini, neofascism, Northern League, politics, schools, Tor Bella Monaca, young people.

by Alessandra Arpaia

CW: violence

Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Italian party Fratelli d’Italia, has recently published a book about her life. One Italian journalist has described the book as the “biography of a leader who has been trying for some time to humanise her public image”. Another called it the “perfect influencer biography”, and a book filled with “pre-made sentences that would look great on Instagram”. Many others have criticised the book for its outright lies. Needless to say, it’s sparked widespread controversy.

SKATING ON THE EAST COAST

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community and tagged barely coping clothing, cigarette skateboards, cobholm, Community, delta four, DIY, doghead promo, drug store, eaton park, featured, gils sk8 east anglia, grassroots, local, loddon, mainstream, norwich, punk, shed, sk8, skate, skate park, street, subculture, trowse diy, uk.

by Ash

Olympics aside, it’s an interesting time for skateboarding, especially on the UK east coast. To shredder’s delight we’ve witnessed new parks crop up in Loddon and Cobholm to name a couple, and to our dismay old scene relics like the Trowse DIY spot have been levelled. New local projects such as Cigarette skateboards, Barely coping clothing, Girls sk8 east anglia, the shed and Doghead promo have been established to support the scene, whilst Norfolk’s beloved Drug store have had their iconic sign nicked shortly before closing doors and moving into a dreamy new venue.

NORSE WORKERS POISED TO STRIKE

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community and tagged Alan Waters, Connaught, environmental service workers, featured, Jonathan Dunning, key workers, Kill the Bill, NCC, NCSL, Norfolk Conservative Party, Norfolk County Council, Norse, Norwich and District Trades Council, Norwich City Council, Norwich City Hall, Norwich Greens, Norwich Labour Party, PCSC Bill, strike, trade unions, Unison, Unite.

By Sean Meleady

Around 400 workers, previously employed by (Conservative-run) Norfolk County Council-owned company Norse, are threatening strike action due to a dispute about pay and conditions. Environmental service workers, responsible for street-cleaning and park maintenance, are due to transfer from Norse to an arms-lengths company run by Labour-controlled Norwich City Council.

OUR LAND, OUR STREETS: NORWICH’S KILL THE BILL PROTEST

Posted on April 7, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community, Inter|national and tagged civil disobedience, civil liberties, dissent, featured, GRT, gypsy, human rights, killthebill, norwich, occupy, police, police violence, right to protest, Robert Kett, Roma, traveller, trespass.

by Yali Banton-Heath

While Archant published clickbait headlines in the EDP and Norwich Evening News that chose to spotlight the pink chalk ‘vandalism’ of a war memorial, Saturday’s Kill the Bill protest in Norwich city centre was in fact a peaceful display of solidarity, and an empowering antidote to the violence that protesters elsewhere in the country have been subjected to. In Bristol, boards reading ‘People Over Property‘ now surround the former plinth of the Edward Colston statue, and act as a visual reminder of both the police and the media establishment’s skewed priorities when it comes to covering protests. Chalk gets washed away with a spell of wet weather. Authoritarian bills don’t.

‘FORWARD MOMENTUM’ OR CONTINUED DECLINE?

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community, Perspectives and tagged activism, bureaucracy, campaigning, community organising, david evans, democracy, general election, general election 2017, general election 2019, general election campaign, Green Party, jeremy corbyn, jon lansman, keir starmer, Labour, labour party, momentum, momentum norfolk, NCG, Norfolk Labour, party democracy, rallies, social media, socialism, Yvette Cooper.

by Sean Meleady

A group of left-wing Norfolk Labour activists have re-founded the Norfolk branch of the socialist pressure group Momentum. Originally they were affiliated with the pro-reform Forward Momentum faction, which argued that the group needed to change in a post-Corbyn era. Following the victory of Forward Momentum candidates in the Labour Party’s internal National Coordinating Group (NCG) elections, at the expense of the Momentum Renewal slate associated with Momentum founder Jon Lansman, they hope that the group can be revived locally.

THE UNDERGROUND MUSIC SCENE AFTER COVID

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Arts, Community and tagged arts, Brexit, covid, events industry, featured, festival, funding, grassroots, independent venues, lockdown, music, music scene, music venue trust, nightlife, norwich, pandemic, punk, small business, subculture, venues.

by Ash

Your local music scene is a hive of energy which fuses together networks of people from all walks of life. It’s as much an awkward social battleground as it is an arena where ideas can be shared and explored in confidence and solidarity; it sustains avenues of expression which promote unity and mutual aid and offers sanctuary for people from disadvantaged and marginalised backgrounds to let off some steam. So as we enter a political chapter dominated by censorship and surveillance, we should all be asking ourselves what we can do to keep it alive.

Community

THE HOLIDAY HOME PARADOX: WE LOVE CORNWALL BUT FEEL COMPELLED TO DESTROY IT

by Sarah Edgcumbe

NORWICH SHOWS SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE

By Sean Meleady and Callum James

ITALY’S FAR-RIGHT ARE INDOCTRINATING SCHOOL CHILDREN

NORSE WORKERS POISED TO STRIKE

By Sean Meleady

OUR LAND, OUR STREETS: NORWICH’S KILL THE BILL PROTEST

THE UNDERGROUND MUSIC SCENE AFTER COVID

by Ash

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By Rabbi Binyamin Sheldrake, of the Adat Yeshua Messianic Synagogue, Norwich

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