ABSTRACT
Banners and flags were widely used in community celebrations as well as in political protests to mark the working-class presence on the streets of early nineteenth-century Britain. This chapter examines historians' use of banners in their accounts of popular politics by analysing written and visual sources. It presents the history and design of surviving examples recorded in the National Banner Survey of all United Kingdom museum collections and relates this evidence to changes in their iconography, usage and production. The rise of professionally-made banners is related to the puzzle of why there are no surviving Chartist banners. Many contemporary accounts of radical movements, particularly from the Peterloo Massacre (1819) onwards, make reference to banners. Newspapers described banners, and in 1842 Flora Tristan recorded a list of Chartist banner slogans, but in most cases the descriptions are usually tantalisingly brief.
