Capenhurst Women’s Peace Camp (1982-3) and After: Local nuclear resistance, grassroots feminisms, and transnational solidarities

This paper focuses on the local specificities and experiences of Capenhurst Women’s Peace Camp, established outside British Nuclear Fuels Limited on the Wirral in 1982. Decentring Greenham Common from our understanding of Cold War peace camps, I recover Capenhurst as an important case study for comparative investigation, aiming to reveal multiple shifting, overlapping, and conflicting (anti-) nuclear cultures in 1980s Britain.

Capenhurst was spatially and temporally unique, rooted in distinct local contexts across Merseyside and Cheshire. Yet, it was also connected to a wider web of national and transnational networks of resistance. This paper explores this complex interplay, demonstrating how nationally defined movements impacted upon and were experienced by local communities, and, conversely, how the scope and impact of grassroots activism could stretch far beyond the immediate locality.

I also explore the ‘afterlives’ of Capenhurst women through Merseyside Women for Peace, and the widening of their activism in the mid-1980s. Alongside – and interlinked with – their local focus, this paper will highlight how the women were able to adopt an ambitiously wide-ranging, global, and decolonial outlook, forged through surprising yet powerful translocal and transnational solidarity networks.

Rachel Collett is a doctoral researcher at the University of Liverpool, where her PhD focuses on the Merseyside Women’s Liberation Movement, 1969-1990s. Her writing has been published in Women’s History Review, Tribune, Red Pepper, Liverpool Post, and Evan Smith and Dan Frost’s forthcoming edited collection, In Solidarity, Under Suspicion. Rachel was also recently part of the ‘Women’s Grassroots Activism’ AHRC research team, and is co-organiser of the ‘Beyond the Fragments: 45 Years On’ project with Alfie Steer

– This event is free, but booking is required.