About this archive
The Free Press was a radical "alternative" newspaper published in Liverpool during the 1970s under the slogan "News you're not supposed to know".
Copies of the Free Press have survived in various places but the paper they are printed on is becoming fragile and the purpose of this archive is to preserve them in a more permanent digital form which can be read online.
One reason for preserving them is the picture they give of life (and activism) in a city that has often shown a rebellious streak – to the extent that it has sometimes been viewed from London more as a troublesome outpost of empire than a mainland British city. In 1911, for example, the government even despatched troops and sent a gunboat up the Mersey to threaten striking workers.
The Free Press story
The Free Press was started by a group of young journalists discontented with the way life in the city was reported by the mainstream local media – and I was one of them. At first we worked on the Free Press secretly in our spare time because we also had fulltime jobs at the Daily Post and the Echo – the papers that the Free Press set out to counter with a different kind of journalism.
To accompany the archive, I have written a historical account of the Free Press: how and why the paper started, and what happened to it.
This also discusses the Free Press in the broader context of a journalistic and publishing phenomenon: the dozens of small-circulation "alternative" newspapers that emerged in Britain's towns and cities around the same time. It was a phenomenon driven mainly by disillusion with conventional politics but facilitated by developments in printing technology that opened the way for people with very limited resources to publish their own newspapers.
During its six-year existence the Free Press published 31 issues, with a total of more than 300 tabloid-sized pages. These have all been digitised for the archive as large PDF files (about five megabytes each).
How to use the archive
To explore the archive, it's easiest to start by viewing the front pages of all the issues. Click on a front page to view small images of all the pages in that particular issue. Click on any page to open the large PDF version in a new tab.
If you are searching for something specific there is an alphabetical index listing topics, people, organisations, etc, mentioned in the archive.
You can also search the archive using Google. Enter your search terms and add "site:freepressarchive.com" (without quotes) in the search box.
Other sections of the archive
There was a variety of other "alternative" publishing activity in the city at the time and some of it is documented in the "Bits and pieces" section. This includes scanned pages from several small-scale publications, including the Tuebrook Bugle, the Mersey People, the Scottie Press, Pak-o-Lies and Openings magazine.
The "Resources" section is a collection of links to articles about the Liverpool Free Press, plus information about the "alternative" press in other parts of Britain.
Brian Whitaker
Privacy note: This is a non-commercial website. It doesn't use cookies or monitor users' activity.
Contact form