Leigh People's Paper
Making this zine and contemplating the plusses of print over digital media feels an overly nostalgic, even conservative, position in a time of The Online. I’ve made concerted effort over the past five issues to resist talking about STAT’s chosen medium - a print ‘zine’ - cos I’d rather not indulge in adjacent wanky “I-was-born-in-the-wrong-generation” discourse.
The purpose of this zine was, in essence, a way of forcing myself out of the house, and, maybe as a consequence of that, motivating others to do the same. I suppose it’s cool having all media in a slip of glass beside your bed (yeah alright, grandad), but, unbound to any real-world interactions and locations, it becomes passive and increasingly manipulated by the commercial interests of ‘Big Tech’.
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| all excerpts of Leigh People’s Paper are credited to their original authors and have been reproduced here with their kind permission |
Now when comparing online to off, it’s less an aesthetic judgment of the medium, more a reaction to the systemic forces which influence each medium. What I’m trying to say is: these smelly grey pages are ours. Your eye movements aren’t being tracked, we’re not spewing cookie tick-boxes at you, it’s just a little magazine of cool things done by cool people not too far from yourself. In this vein, it’s fair to say STAT shares something with Leigh People’s Paper.
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‘Write us an article, you don’t have to be a journalist, none of us are.’
- Leigh People's Paper, Issue 001 (Feb '73)
In February of 1973, on the cover of a first Leigh People’s Paper, its editors decried the existing local press as failing Leigh and invited anyone, journalist or not, to send in their views. This was a non-profit, independent paper that would last 10 years and was distributed amongst Leigh’s newsagents for just two pence a copy. Coming into existence thanks to a loan from the Vicar of Leigh, the paper was produced by a small group of unpaid writers and cartoonists. Providing commentary on local issues of housing, insufficient wages and an ineffectual council, even national criticism of a racist press (not much has changed eh), each edition is honest, gritty, but never defeatist.
Flicking through a stack of copies in the reading room, what I saw was something so at odds with my conception of ‘local politics’ that it was inspiring. Rather than today’s NIMBY-ism, potholes and councillors posed by overfilled bins, this stuff was, quite boldly, shining light on the disappointing activities of those with too much power and within a clear, collectivist narrative. And consequently, a view that politics should extend beyond the ballot box, even if ‘your team’ wins.
Physical publications like this are necessary. Too often the view of, so-called, ex-‘red-wall’ areas, like Leigh, is that they are brimming with nationalists, reactionaries, aggro-individualists. It’s not true, but these preconceptions go unchecked when the people in question have no vehicle for expression. Instead, ’Leigh’ becomes an amorphous blob viewed through the lenses of commentariat parachutes; it’s people made malleable by a billionaire-owned press or a middle-class lacking the backbone to cast cynical views as their own.
