[SUCULTURE]

 

 

The New Beacon Bookshop, the UK’s first specialist Black publishing house, bookshop, resource and research centre first opened in 1966, as a space for Black British, Caribbean, African, African-American and Asian writers.

 

Throughout its 55 years, the New Beacon Bookshop has been central to the nurturing and development of the ‘Black Supplementary School Movement’ in the UK, the ‘Black Education Movement’, as well as a campaign for the decolonisation of the current UK-based academic curriculum.

 

Unlike other bookshops and online retail outlets, such Amazon et al, the New Beacon has played a pioneering role in community cohesion, activism and education, to both old and young.

 

Some of its key highlights include;

 

• The founding of the annual International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, in 1982, an important repository for fiction and non-fiction works by Black authors.

 

• In collaboration with Bookfair, the development and creation of the George Padmore Institute (GPI), in 1991, an archive and library committed to preserving and curating the archives of Black political, cultural activists and Black History – pre and post the 1945 5th Pan-African Congress held in Manchester.

 

As an important Pan-African institute, the New Beacon Books has an extensive tradition of holding public educational programmes, including public lectures, readings and book launches.

 

For more on the Institute, click on the above image.

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