Thomas Banbury

Hi! I'm a historical writer and researcher, contributing original research to local and national platforms. Check out my latest articles here and find out more about my work.

Tribune •

When Sunday Schools Taught Socialism

Before 1870, Christian Sunday schools provided some of the only educational opportunities for the children of working-class families. Often associated with nonconformist groups like the Baptists and Unitarians, these schools were staffed by laypeople who instructed children in the tenets of religion alongside basic literacy and numeracy. But after the development of a national system of compulsory education for children, often under the auspices of the Church of England, Sunday schools shifted f
Tribune •

Why the Putney Debates Still Matter Today

Parliamentary sovereignty, manhood suffrage, and freedom of religion; now three of the foundational tenets of the British constitution. In 1647, however, these ideals bore the hallmark of a group of political and religious radicals and their military sympathisers, then camped within striking distance of the capital.

The movement advocating for these principles as the basis of government, known as the Levellers, was relatively short-lived and had lost most of its supporters by the 1650s. But in
Tribune •

The Struggle for the Great Reform Act

In 1791, the writer and revolutionary Thomas Paine commented in his pamphlet The Rights of Man that ‘the town of Old Sarum, which contains not three houses, sends two members; and the town of Manchester, which contains upwards of sixty thousand souls, is not admitted to send any.’ This was an extreme example of a situation replicated across Britain in the centuries before the Representation of the People Act 1832.

In a large number of so-called ‘rotten’ and ‘pocket’ boroughs, a handful of prope

How Workers’ Struggles Won our Rights

Since the 1880s, May Day has been celebrated as International Workers’ Day – a focus for protests to advance the labour movement and celebrate the workers’ rights that many of us now take for granted. Looking back at the struggles involved in achieving these rights shows us the development not only of legislation in the UK, but also of the trade unionist and labour movement as a whole.

Before the Industrial Revolution in Europe, the rhythms of labour were determined by the natural world; the se
ERA Magazine •

The Suburbs of Hell: 500 years of polluted air in London •

Air, and what it might carry into our bodies and our homes, is more on people’s minds than usual at the moment, but the link between air quality and health is an old one. Most people who studied the Black Death in Europe will be familiar with medieval miasma theory, the notion that disease came from stagnant and impure air which could be cleansed with the burning of incense and fragrant plants. As early as the thirteenth century, people complained about other problems with the air – in particula

The Ancient Roots of Trespass

A number of different meanings have accumulated around the idea of ‘trespass’. In a religious sense, we see it rendered alternately as ‘sin’ and ‘debt’. In law, any action contrary to the civil code is technically trespassing. But in its most basic sense, all it means is ‘to walk across’, from the Latin trans and passus: think ‘to pass through’. It shares this etymology with the related term ‘transgress’, which started out equally innocently as ‘to move across’. Compare ‘progress’ or ‘ingress’.
ERA Magazine •

The environmentalist class •

How we view a spot of natural beauty has more to do with class and politics than we might first think. Often, a purely emotional response to the landscape is limited to those who don’t have a working relationship with nature – while farming, fishing, and forestry communities have to balance the economic role of the environment in their lives with their own cultural ideas about its value.

Emotional responses in large part shape government ecological policy: the Forestry Commission’s website stat

A greener look at the past? Teaching environmental history at Key Stage 4 and 5

Environmental history, which deals primarily with changes in environments and the ways historical societies have interacted with them, is not a new field. Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore, a long study of ‘Nature’ in western thought, was published in 1967. Keith Thomas and William Cronon both made substantial contributions to the growing scholarship in 1983 with Man and the Natural World and Changes in the Land respectively. It seems surprising, therefore, that perspectives from en

Britain’s Long Fight Over the Right to Protest

‘An unlawful assembly is the first degree or the beginning; a Rout the next step or proceeding; and a Riot the full effect and consummation of such a disorder and forbidden action.’ This was the definition of three common law offences—riot, rout, and unlawful assembly—formulated by jurist William Lambard in 1581. Despite lacking clarity over the number of people involved, their intentions, and their actual actions, elements of it persisted right up until the Public Order Act passed by the Thatch