Exhibition Launch: 760 Days in Sanctuary

Written Dr Kerry Pimblott

10 October 2025

Authors note: This article is part of a series of blogs documenting activities emerging from the multi-year project, Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power, 1964-1985, led by Drs Kerry Pimblott (Manchester) and Kennetta Hammond Perry (Northwestern) as part of an effort to better document, preserve and (re)present the history of Black Power and its legacies for local traditions of anti-racist resistance in the North West and East Midlands.

Today marks the launch of a new exhibition, 760 Days in Sanctuary: Viraj Mendis and Resistance to the Border Regime, at the Ascension Church Hulme. The exhibition is part of a two-year long collaboration with the Radical Reading Room Collective focused on surfacing histories of anti-racist resistance with a special focus on the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign (VMDC), an anti-deportation campaign that culminated in the longest sanctuary in modern British history. You can learn more about this collaboration in our earlier blog here.

The exhibition's launch coincides with The World Transformed, an annual festival of radical culture and politics, that is taking place across Hulme and Moss Side in Manchester. Over the next three days activists, workers, artists, musicians, and writers are coming together in hopes of imagining a different more just world. We are very honoured to be participating in the festival and contributing to critical dialogues around the history and contemporary struggles for migrant rights and border resistance.

The 760 Days in Sanctuary Exhibition draws on a new archive and oral history collection created in partnership with former VMDC supporters that will be housed at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre in Manchester Central Library. These records tell an important story of how a small church in Hulme became the flashpoint for a nationally significant struggle against Britain's tightening border regime in the 1980s. Campaign members innovated a new tactic and forged an expansive politics of solidarity with roots deep in the local community and connections that spanned the globe. Featured are spectacular images of the sanctuary and street-level protests captured by campaign photographer, Charlie Baker. These sit alongside campaign posters and other ephemera as well as snippets of oral histories conducted with Viraj and Karen Mendis and other campaign members.

All are welcome and you can provide feedback in-person on-site or via email to Dr Kerry Pimblott at kerry.pimblott@manchester.ac.uk.