National Gathering – Manchester

Reclaim the Power have their next gathering from 22nd to 23rd February 2025 in Manchester! The exact location of the gathering will be emailed to you a week before.

The location for Saturday will be in central Manchester: the closest train stations are Manchester Victoria (10 mins walk), Manchester Piccadilly (15 mins walk), and Manchester Oxford Road (25 mins walk). The venue for Sunday will be slightly outside of central Manchester; the nearest train station is Levenshulme.

This is our first national gathering since the planned camp against Drax was pre-emptively shut down by the police. The gathering will be taking some learnings and reflections from the debrief (in Sheffield in November 2024) and look forward to the strategy of Reclaim the Power for the next few months. It is both aimed for new people who have never come to anything in RtP, including if you were going to come to the camp, as well as those who have been here for years. All are welcome!

Who are Reclaim the Power?

Reclaim the Power is a UK based direct action network fighting for social, environmental and economic justice. We aim to build a broad based movement, working in solidarity with frontline communities to effectively confront environmentally destructive industries and the social and economic forces driving climate change.

What is Drax?

Drax is a wood biomass power station located near Selby, in Yorkshire. It is a former coal-power station that converted to biomass, and now entirely burns wood biomass. Drax is the UKs single largest carbon emitter and world’s biggest tree burner. Their actions have been repeatedly linked to driving environmental racism and causing huge amounts of harm to communitiesforests and biodiversity.

What is a gathering?

We organise two-day national gatherings to make collective decisions.  These are held at different towns and cities across the country. We use them to make important decisions, but they also serve as spaces for learning, developing skills and getting to know people.

All our gatherings provide crash space, childcare, and cheap and vegan food. All our meeting venues are wheelchair accessible.

We try to make our gatherings as inclusive as possible for newcomers, including the use of a friendly “buddy” system, so don’t worry if you’ve never been to anything like this before!