On this day: The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common in 1848

On the 10^th of April, 1848, a “Monster Rally” of Chartists – The Great Chartist Meeting – took place on Kennington Common in London’s southeast. The event was photographed in what was one of the first pictures of a crowd ever taken.

The Chartist movement was a working-class movement for political reform, though it had faded out by 1850.

Six years later, Kennington Common was reopened as Kennington Park and to this day the area still provides that function.