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"excerpt": "Anarchism in the United Kingdom: the British anarchist movement from William Godwin through Kropotkin's Freedom, French exiles in London, ethical anarchism, the Spanish Civil War, Herbert Read, and today's Anarchist Federation.",
"snippet": "Anarchism in the United Kingdom: the British anarchist movement from William Godwin through Kropotkin's Freedom, French exiles in London, ethical anarchism, the Spanish Civil War, Herbert Read, and today's Anarchist Federation.",
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"markdown": "# Anarchism in the United Kingdom\n\nAnarchism in the United Kingdom is the history of anarchist political movements, ideas, and organizations in Britain, from [William Godwin](https://www.edgepedia.org/william-godwin)'s late eighteenth-century rejection of government to the small federations and networks active today. The movement was never large in Britain, but it produced influential thinkers, hosted exiled revolutionaries from continental Europe, and repeatedly reinvented itself in response to changing ideas about the state.\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Intellectual origin | William Godwin, called \"the father of British anarchism\" by Peter Marshall, rejected law, political institutions, and private property, though he was not part of the anarchist movement that grew in the second half of the nineteenth century[1](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/mobilizing-william-godwin-the-father-of-british-anarchism-history-strategy-and-the-intellectual-cultures-of-postwar-british-anarchism/16DCCE95DBD005E20AF479386284C208) |\n| Organized beginnings | Anarchism emerged as an independent political movement in the mid-nineteenth century, and became a significant current within British socialism in the decades before the First World War[2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/anarchist-and-the-technocrat-herbert-read-c-p-snow-and-the-future-of-britain/0E2D46B60DDD81D60D4E0A3CA84563FA) |\n| Kropotkin and Freedom | Peter Kropotkin began exile in Britain in 1886 and co-founded the anarchist newspaper *Freedom* after his arrival[2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/anarchist-and-the-technocrat-herbert-read-c-p-snow-and-the-future-of-britain/0E2D46B60DDD81D60D4E0A3CA84563FA) |\n| French exile community | Around 500 French anarchists lived in exile in London between 1880 and 1914, making Britain a rallying point for radical exiles when other European countries closed their borders[3](https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/43364) |\n| Public image | In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, especially the 1890s, anarchists were a small but highly publicized dissident group, portrayed in the conservative and tabloid press as criminals and conspirators intent on revolutionary violence[4](https://openresearch.surrey.ac.uk/esploro/outputs/bookChapter/Anarchists-Authorities-and-the-Battle-for/99510952802346) • [5](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1317725) |\n| Postwar readership | A 1960 survey by *Freedom* found that only 15 percent of its readers belonged to traditional groupings of workers and peasants, while 85 percent were classed as white collar workers[1](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/mobilizing-william-godwin-the-father-of-british-anarchism-history-strategy-and-the-intellectual-cultures-of-postwar-british-anarchism/16DCCE95DBD005E20AF479386284C208) |\n| Present organization | The Anarchist Federation (AF/AFed), an organization of revolutionary class struggle anarchists committed to anarchist communism, is Britain's member of the International of Anarchist Federations[6](https://i-f-a.org/members/) • [7](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-federation-aims-and-principles) |\n\n## Godwin and the intellectual origins\n\nWilliam Godwin supplied the tradition's founding text in Britain. Later historians such as George Woodcock and [Peter Marshall](https://www.edgepedia.org/peter-marshall) included Godwin in their accounts of anarchism, with Marshall calling him \"the father of British anarchism,\" while recognizing that Godwin could not have belonged to the anarchist movement that developed after the mid-nineteenth century. His thorough rejection of law, political institutions, and private property was the basis for his inclusion in the anarchist canon[1](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/mobilizing-william-godwin-the-father-of-british-anarchism-history-strategy-and-the-intellectual-cultures-of-postwar-british-anarchism/16DCCE95DBD005E20AF479386284C208).\n\nHow later anarchists used Godwin mattered as much as what he wrote. In the postwar period, three influential anarchist writers and activists, George Woodcock, Colin Ward, and Albert Meltzer, each mobilized Godwin to define and defend a particular version of anarchist intellectual culture in Britain, with distinct histories and strategies for social change[1](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/mobilizing-william-godwin-the-father-of-british-anarchism-history-strategy-and-the-intellectual-cultures-of-postwar-british-anarchism/16DCCE95DBD005E20AF479386284C208).\n\n## The late Victorian and Edwardian movement\n\nOrganized anarchism took root in Britain in the 1880s. [Working class](https://www.edgepedia.org/working-class) activists such as Frank Kitz and Joe Lane linked the older Chartist movement, Owenism, the British section of the [First International](https://www.edgepedia.org/first-international), and the free speech fights of the 1870s to the newly emergent socialism of the 1880s[8](https://libcom.org/article/anarchist-communism-britain-1870-1991). A sizable influx of anarchists arrived from abroad, as had occurred with refugee radicals from Spain and Italy in the late nineteenth century[9](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317725/1/281916.pdf).\n\n**Exiles in London.** Britain's openness to political refugees shaped the movement's character. As most European countries closed their borders to anarchists at the end of the nineteenth century, Britain remained the one country offering shelter to such dissident groups, and London became the rallying point for international radical exiles. The roughly 500 French anarchists exiled there between 1880 and 1914 sustained international networks, engaged in political activism, and attracted polemics and controversial police surveillance[3](https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/43364).\n\n**Kropotkin's presence.** The personal appeal of [Peter Kropotkin](https://www.edgepedia.org/peter-kropotkin), who began his British exile in 1886, drew figures from [William Morris](https://www.edgepedia.org/william-morris) and [George Bernard Shaw](https://www.edgepedia.org/george-bernard-shaw) to Robert Cunninghame Graham into his orbit. Whether drawn to his anarchism or opposed to it, as Shaw was, these interlocutors found anarchism a tradition that forced comment[2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/anarchist-and-the-technocrat-herbert-read-c-p-snow-and-the-future-of-britain/0E2D46B60DDD81D60D4E0A3CA84563FA). After settling in Britain, Kropotkin helped establish *Freedom*, which then served as the leading editorial hub for the international network of anarchist militants, largely refugees, living in London in that era[2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/anarchist-and-the-technocrat-herbert-read-c-p-snow-and-the-future-of-britain/0E2D46B60DDD81D60D4E0A3CA84563FA) • [10](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12584).\n\n**Public image and reality.** The historian Haia Shpayer's study of British anarchism from 1881 to 1914 contrasts the movement's actual pursuits and beliefs with its popular image, which cast the anarchist as an unscrupulous criminal and the movement as a conspiracy intent on unleashing revolutionary violence. That image imparted little of the movement's reality, yet it was precisely through this image that anarchism penetrated social consciousness and exerted its most noticeable impact on society[5](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1317725).\n\n## Ethical anarchism, 1885 to 1900\n\nA distinct current, described by the political theorist Mark Bevir as ethical anarchism, grew in Britain in the late nineteenth century, exemplified by the Freedom Group and the Tolstoyans. These anarchists took on the moral, and even religious, preoccupations of bodies like the Fellowship of the New Life, and in their ideas they had more in common with counter-cultural circles such as the aesthetes than with previous kinds of anarchism. It led them into movements for sex reform and communal living[11](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2b6740z5).\n\nMatthew Thomas's study of anarchist counter-cultures from 1880 to 1914 argues that, although anarchist influence was weakened by sectarianism and organizational failures, anarchists made an original contribution to British political culture as theorists and practical activists, with contributions to educational practices, communal ways of living, trade unionism, syndicalism, and the status of women[12](https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/4237/).\n\n## War, decline, and the Spanish Civil War\n\nThe First World War ended anarchism's \"heroic period\" in Britain. Internecine conflict over the legitimacy of the war embroiled leading theorists, most notably Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta, also in exile in Britain, in acrimonious debate, undermining unity just as increased official scrutiny damaged the movement's infrastructure. The offices of *Freedom* were subject to a number of wartime police raids, and the apparent success of the [Russian Revolution](https://www.edgepedia.org/russian-revolution) of 1917 reduced anarchism's appeal. After a period of erratic publication, *Freedom* itself ceased to appear in 1927[2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/anarchist-and-the-technocrat-herbert-read-c-p-snow-and-the-future-of-britain/0E2D46B60DDD81D60D4E0A3CA84563FA).\n\nThe [Spanish Civil War](https://www.edgepedia.org/spanish-civil-war) of 1936 to 1939 gave the small British movement a cause. According to the historian Morris Brodie, British anarchists coordinated solidarity for their Spanish comrades through organizations such as the CNT-FAI London Bureau, the AnarchoSyndicalist Union, and Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista, and some traveled to Spain to produce propaganda for the CNT-FAI Foreign Language Division or to aid persecuted revolutionaries. The movement lacked a mass following, but activists maintained their ideals and continued to agitate in difficult circumstances[13](https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/publications/crying-in-the-wilderness-the-british-anarchist-movement-during-th/). Interest in anarcho-syndicalism revived with the onset of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, and at the end of the Second World War the Anarchist Federation of Britain was formed[14](https://iwa-ait.org/sites/default/files/documents/british-anarcho-syndicalism_1.pdf).\n\n## The postwar decades\n\nPostwar British anarchism was a story of patchy, partial, and inconsistent advance, intertwined with prolonged periods of retrenchment[15](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/against-the-grain/british-anarchism-in-the-era-of-thatcherism/8A8142C4F0B82057AA3FF7C6346D5757). Its social base also shifted. The 1960 *Freedom* survey found that only 15 percent of readers belonged to the traditional groupings of workers and peasants, while 85 percent were classed as white collar workers, the largest group being teachers and students, with many architects, doctors, and people employed in the arts, sciences, and journalism. Colin Ward had already observed in 1955 that a paper like *Freedom* tended to be read by people with more formal education than the majority of manual workers[1](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/mobilizing-william-godwin-the-father-of-british-anarchism-history-strategy-and-the-intellectual-cultures-of-postwar-british-anarchism/16DCCE95DBD005E20AF479386284C208).\n\n**Herbert Read and the technocratic state.** The art critic and anarchist [Herbert Read](https://www.edgepedia.org/herbert-read) declared for anarchism in the aftermath of the Spanish Revolution. In the summer of 1959 he became embroiled in a public dispute with the novelist and scientist [C. P. Snow](https://www.edgepedia.org/c-p-snow) in the pages of *The London Magazine*, an early contribution to the \"two cultures\" debate that anticipated [F. R. Leavis](https://www.edgepedia.org/f-r-leavis)'s more famous critique. Read challenged Snow's argument that technological and political modernization was essential to Britain's international role, seeing in the unthinking promotion of a technological revolution an existential threat to \"the tender shoots of all that is human.\" His intervention reflected a broader shift in anarchist thought: where nineteenth-century anarchists had used organic metaphors to depict the state as a monster, twentieth-century anarchists adopted mechanical metaphors of the state as an all-consuming machine, focusing attention on technocracy and the rise of expertise, regulation, and political centralization in the postwar state[2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/anarchist-and-the-technocrat-herbert-read-c-p-snow-and-the-future-of-britain/0E2D46B60DDD81D60D4E0A3CA84563FA).\n\n## From the miners' strike to the present\n\nThe upturn in anarchism's fortunes came in the volatile political context of early [Thatcherism](https://www.edgepedia.org/thatcherism). Division and disunity still afflicted sections of the movement, but the improved current of the 1970s and the political context of early Thatcherism kept centrifugal pressures in check[15](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/against-the-grain/british-anarchism-in-the-era-of-thatcherism/8A8142C4F0B82057AA3FF7C6346D5757). Benjamin Franks's study of British anarchisms and the 1984 to 1985 miners' strike distinguishes the main currents of British anarchism at the time of the strike[16](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030981680508700113), and his thesis *Rebel Alliances* examines the tactics and organizational methods of British and Irish anarchist groups operating between 1984 and 1999, showing how class struggle anarchism, a minority trend even within the libertarian milieu, developed into a significant and lively anti-political movement[17](https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11841/1/342059.pdf).\n\nContemporary British anarchism is organized mainly around small federations. The Anarchist Federation describes itself as an organization of revolutionary class struggle anarchists committed to anarchist communism, operating through delegation and direct democracy with recallable delegates[7](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-federation-aims-and-principles) • [18](https://afed.org.uk/about/about-the-af/), and it represents Britain in the [International of Anarchist Federations](https://www.edgepedia.org/international-of-anarchist-federations)[6](https://i-f-a.org/members/).\n\n## References\n\n1. [Matthew S. Adams and John-Erik Hansson (2024). Mobilizing William Godwin, the \"Father of British Anarchism\". Modern Intellectual History, Cambridge University Press.](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/mobilizing-william-godwin-the-father-of-british-anarchism-history-strategy-and-the-intellectual-cultures-of-postwar-british-anarchism/16DCCE95DBD005E20AF479386284C208)\n2. [Matthew S. Adams (2024). The Anarchist and the Technocrat: Herbert Read, C. P. Snow, and the Future of Britain. Journal of British Studies 63(2), pp. 301-322.](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/anarchist-and-the-technocrat-herbert-read-c-p-snow-and-the-future-of-britain/0E2D46B60DDD81D60D4E0A3CA84563FA)\n3. [Constance Bantman (2013). The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation. Liverpool University Press.](https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/43364)\n4. [Anarchists, Authorities and the Battle for Public Space, 1880-1914. University of Surrey.](https://openresearch.surrey.ac.uk/esploro/outputs/bookChapter/Anarchists-Authorities-and-the-Battle-for/99510952802346)\n5. [H. Shpayer (1981). British anarchism 1881-1914: reality and appearance. Doctoral thesis, University of London, UCL Discovery.](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1317725)\n6. [Members, International of Anarchist Federations.](https://i-f-a.org/members/)\n7. [Anarchist Federation. Aims and Principles. The Anarchist Library.](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-federation-aims-and-principles)\n8. [Anarchist communism in Britain, 1870-1991. libcom.org.](https://libcom.org/article/anarchist-communism-britain-1870-1991)\n9. [H. Shpayer (1981). British anarchism 1881-1914 (full text PDF). UCL Discovery.](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317725/1/281916.pdf)\n10. [Pepetogno and Gutiérrez (2020). The nation against the State: The Irish question and Britain-based anarchists in the Age of Empire. Nations and Nationalism.](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12584)\n11. [Mark Bevir (1996). The Rise of Ethical Anarchism in Britain, 1885-1900. eScholarship.](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2b6740z5)\n12. [Matthew Thomas (1998). Paths to utopia: anarchist counter-cultures in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain 1880-1914. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.](https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/4237/)\n13. [Morris Brodie. Crying in the Wilderness? The British Anarchist Movement During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. Anarchist Studies 27(2).](https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/publications/crying-in-the-wilderness-the-british-anarchist-movement-during-th/)\n14. [A short history of British anarcho-syndicalism. International Workers' Association.](https://iwa-ait.org/sites/default/files/documents/british-anarcho-syndicalism_1.pdf)\n15. [British anarchism in the era of Thatcherism. In Against the grain, Cambridge University Press.](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/against-the-grain/british-anarchism-in-the-era-of-thatcherism/8A8142C4F0B82057AA3FF7C6346D5757)\n16. [Benjamin Franks (2005). British anarchisms and the miners' strike. Capital & Class.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030981680508700113)\n17. [Benjamin Franks. Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British anarchisms. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.](https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11841/1/342059.pdf)\n18. [About the AF. Anarchist Federation.](https://afed.org.uk/about/about-the-af/)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Politics and government › Political systems and ideas › Political ideologies › Anarchism › Anarchism by country › Anarchism in the United Kingdom*\n\n*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n",
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