Plaque for Peterloo Massacre

'St Peter’s Square, Manchester (formerly St Peter’s Field), played host to an outrage against over 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy and anti-poverty protesters.'

Manchester & Warrington Area Meeting has installed a plaque to commemorate the Peterloo Massacre, 202 years after the travesty.

The plaque is fixed to the wall that surrounds Central Manchester Meeting House which, according to local Friend Clare McCann, is ‘a rare survival of that time and formed the northern boundary of St Peter’s Field’, now St Peter’s Square.

‘On the sixteenth of August 1819 the open area around what’s now St Peter’s Square, Manchester (formerly St Peter’s Field), played host to an outrage against over 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy and anti-poverty protesters; an event which became known as the Peterloo Massacre’, she told the Friend.

‘An estimated eighteen people, including four women and a child, died from sabre cuts and trampling. Nearly 700 men, women and children received extremely serious injuries.

‘The Massacre occurred during a period of immense political tension and mass protests. Fewer than two per cent of the population had the vote, Manchester didn’t have a member of parliament, and hunger was rife with the disastrous corn laws making bread unaffordable.’

Friends gathered to commemorate the event on 16 August along with supporters of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign. The plaque on Bootle Street was unveiled by professor Robert Poole, author of Peterloo: the English uprising.

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