Taken in Manchester on 15 July 1978, Thomas Blower’s photographs follow the Northern Carnival Against the Nazis from its assembly outside Strangeways Prison to the concert at Alexandra Park. British Culture Archive first published the series in 2021, more than forty years after the event.
Blower is a Manchester documentary photographer whose practice spans more than five decades. Raised in Failsworth, he began taking photographs as a teenager in the mid-1960s.
He grew up on Fildes Street, beside the entrance to the Ferranti electrical engineering works. His father was a labourer at Carborundum in Trafford Park, and his mother was a piecer-up at the Argyle mill. Blower later worked as a sorter in the returns department at the Manchester clothing manufacturer Dannimac.
His photographic practice developed alongside paid employment. During the 1970s, using a Canon AE-1, he photographed Ancoats, Hattersley, Moss Side and central Manchester. The resulting archive encompasses demolition sites, housing estates, children in the street, buses, political demonstrations and music events.
There was no commissioned brief or defined project. Blower photographed Manchester over time, responding to events and to the physical changes taking place across the city. Taken together, the photographs constitute a sustained record of housing, public space, transport and political life during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Photo © Thomas Blower / BCA. All rights reserved.
Rock Against Racism was established in 1976 to oppose racism within music and British popular culture. The Anti-Nazi League followed in 1977, combining political organisation with a national campaign against the electoral growth and street activity of the National Front.
On 30 April 1978, approximately 80,000 people attended the first Carnival Against the Nazis at Victoria Park in London. Around 2,500 had travelled from Greater Manchester in fifty coaches and minibuses.
Among them were Bernie Wilcox of Rock Against Racism and Geoff Brown of the Anti-Nazi League. During the journey home, Wilcox and Brown decided to organise a corresponding event in Manchester. The Northern Carnival Against the Nazis took place ten weeks later.
The event was assembled through anti-racist organisations, trade unions, music networks and volunteer labour across the North West. It took place during a period in which the National Front was contesting elections and racist violence was a persistent part of public life in Britain.
Around 15,000 people gathered outside Strangeways Prison on Bury New Road. The prison had become a focus of protest following reports of National Front membership among prison officers.
The march travelled through Manchester towards Alexandra Park in Moss Side. Reggae, punk and steel bands performed from lorries along the route. At the park, the marchers joined a further 25,000 people, bringing the estimated attendance to approximately 40,000.
The concert featured Steel Pulse, Buzzcocks, China Street and the Moss Side reggae band Exodus, later known as X-O-Dus.
Photo © Thomas Blower / BCA. All rights reserved.
Blower photographed across the course of the day. The sequence moves between police formations outside Strangeways, marchers travelling through the city and the crowds gathered in Alexandra Park.
His camera remains at crowd level. The series is not organised around the performers or principal organisers. It records the event through those who attended it: their faces, clothing, banners, gestures and proximity to one another. The scale of the carnival emerges through the accumulation of these details.
Blower’s photographs also show the relationship between political organisation and popular music. Punk and reggae gave Rock Against Racism access to young audiences; the Anti-Nazi League provided an established campaigning network. In Blower’s photographs, that alliance is visible in the composition of the crowd rather than confined to the programme or the stage.
He remembered the day in direct terms:
“The gig itself was great. There was no violence, no antagonism; it was just one big party with thousands of people in attendance. People were drinking and smoking a bit of this and that. It was fantastic. I was a big reggae fan myself, but I didn’t dance that often, though when Steel Pulse came on, you couldn’t help but dance.”
Photo © Thomas Blower / BCA. All rights reserved.
Photo © Thomas Blower / BCA. All rights reserved.
The Northern Carnival photographs remained unpublished in Blower’s archive for more than forty years. British Culture Archive first published a selection from his wider Manchester work in 2019, followed by the Northern Carnival series in 2021.
Later that year, photographs from the carnival were included in BCA’s display within Use Hearing Protection: The Early Years of Factory Records at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. The exhibition ran from 19 June 2021 to 3 January 2022.
Blower’s wider Manchester work was subsequently included in A Celebration of Life in the North, 1970s–80s, curated by Paul Wright for British Culture Archive at Bury Art Museum from 4 February to 18 May 2023.
Selected photographs are published through the British Culture Archive Editions programme. BCA licensed Girl on the Bus, Manchester, 1982 for the cover of Tom Benn’s Oxblood, published by Bloomsbury in 2022. Jumping onto Mattresses, Hattersley, 1977 was licensed for the cover of Danny Scott’s The Undisputed King of Selston, published by John Murray Press in 2025.
Blower continues to photograph Manchester using film and digital cameras. British Culture Archive represents selected photographs from his 1970s and 1980s archive for exhibitions, editions, publishing and image licensing. Copyright remains with Thomas Blower.
Photo © Thomas Blower / BCA. All rights reserved.
Photo © Thomas Blower / BCA. All rights reserved.
Photo © Thomas Blower / BCA. All rights reserved.
