The Liverpool Dockers and Reclaim the Streets: Creating Spaces of Solidarity

Abstract

This essay examines the unlikely alliance forged between environmentalist group Reclaim the Streets and a group of Liverpool dockworkers. I propose that excavating historical collaborations between the environmentalist and labour movements offers ways forward for thinking about solidarity. The Liverpool dockers’ dispute was one of the longest running in the history of British industrial relations; however, it has received little academic attention, compared to The Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985, for example. The attention it has received primarily discusses the, admittedly significant, internationalism of the campaign. But the dockworkers’ alliance with Reclaim the Streets is rarely commented on. Using interviews I conducted with activists and dockworkers between 2019 and 2022, and interviews conducted in 2004 by those involved in the dispute, I offer a way of reading this collaboration by attending to its spatial politics and intersections with performance, thereby pointing to the generative character of these political relations.