John Hopkins (political activist)
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For other persons named John Hopkins, see John Hopkins (disambiguation).
John Hopkins (Hoppy) was trained as a physicist at Cambridge. He was influential in the UK Underground in the late 1960s in a number of areas:
- A founder and member of the editorial board of the UK Underground paper International Times (IT).
- Founded the UFO Club in London
- Founded BIT, the information and agitprop arm of IT
- Compiled and stencil duplicated the names, contact details and interests of all of London's 'movers & shakers'. He then gave all of them a copy. This action is credited with greatly boosting the cultural velocity of the 1960s London-based UK Underground.
Hoppy favoured the more anarchistic elements in the "underground" centred around Ladbroke Grove. These included a key figure Mick Farren, who by 1967 was also working at the IT newspaper.
Besides his political activities, Hoppy is a photographer, and he took pictures of many of the big musicians of the 1960s—Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull and so on. He also documented peace marches, poetry readings and various other cultural events. More recently he has taken and exhibited macro photography of flowers and other plants.
