UP Projects

E. A. Markham: When Markham arrived in the UK from Montserrat in 1956, he wanted to be a pop star; his family hoped he would become an academic. As it was, it was in the less lucrative field of poetry that Markham established his reputation. This book offers a humorous look on Black life in Britain. It also presents an account of his travails in the rag-trade.

Emily Zobel Marshall: This interdisciplinary study examines the cultural and historical significance of the Jamaican Anansi folktales. Anansi the spider is the trickster folk hero West African slaves transported to the Caribbean.

Khadijah Ibrahiim: Another Crossing tells the stories of an individual life, of a family, of the communities of Chapeltown and Harehills, and of crucial moments in the making of Leeds as a place where cultures meet. In poetry that sings from the page, Another Crossing recreates places that have been swept away by time, like the house on 56 Cowper Street where Kadijah Ibrahiim's Jamaican grandmother captured her from time to time, where there was black pride and Victorian respectability, where there were aunts who gave the young girl a cultural education, where her grandfather entertained his friends in the sanctum of the West Indian front room - and where there was a forbidden attic whose religious significance only became clear long afterwards.

In this reflective essay, Andrea Levy delves deep into notions of racism and pinpoints events which compelled her to use writing as a tool to explore and understand her Caribbean heritage.

Precious glimpses and surprising rediscoveries: snapshots of black Britain in the decades before the great postwar migrations.

Asher & Martin Hoyles record the stories of twenty-eight early West Indian immigrants: West Indians have been coming to Britain for over 300 years, so the arrival of around 500 Caribbean passengers on the Empire Windrush in 1948 was not new. This book records twenty-eight early West Indian immigrants, such as Norman Manley, Learie Constantine, Una Marson and C.L.R. James, but also less well-known figures like the model Fanny Eaton, nurse Annie Brewster, footballer Andrew Watson and airman Billy Strachan. Their stories are interspersed with Asher's passionate poems.

Striking, illuminating and sometimes surprising images of black culture, community and characters, spanning over a century of British film and TV.

Professor Paul Gilroy: Renowned for his work exploring the social and cultural dimensions of British blackness and black Britishness, assembles a living visual history of their social life in the modern British Isles.

David Olusoga: In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean.

Classic sitcom set in a Peckham barber shop, starring the late, great Norman Beaton. Desmond's was first shown on Channel 4 in 1989 and ran for six years.

Kevin Le Gendre: This is a story of empire, colonialism and then the new energies released by the movements for freedom and independence of the post second-world-war years; of the movements of peoples across borders; of the flow of music around the triangle that takes in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and Great Britain; of temporary but highly influential visitors like Paul Robeson; and of the settlement of ex-colonial peoples who brought their music to Britain, and changed its forms and concerns in the new context.

Sam Selvon: Focusing on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, these seven one-act radio plays vividly capture the loneliness and isolation that can be felt in one of the world's largest cities. With characteristic humor and poignancy, these stories touch on the dreams and disappointments of both the young and old as they face racial and class differences in a sprawling, urban London.

Onyekachi Wambu: In 1948, the SS "Empire Windrush", carrying hundreds of young men and women from the Caribbean, docked in Southampton. The ship's arrival signalled the beginning of a mass migration which was to have profound effects on Britain for the next 50 years. This anthology charts those 50 years.

Andrew Salkey: A brave and pioneering treatment of sexual identity in Caribbean literature, this novel, first published in 1960, follows the fortunes of Johnnie Sobert, a Jamaican exile who works in London at a club that caters to black American servicemen. In flight from his dominant, possessive mother, he immerses himself in the bohemian Soho scene and adopts a wisecracking persona as a cover for his deep-seated insecurities. Adding to Johnnie's confusion is the fact that when he is not at work, he navigates a completely different life in Hempstead, where he lives in a bedsitter and carries on an unsatisfying affair with his white landlady, Fiona. These two worlds provide a lively portrait of Britons reacting to the growing presence of blacks and Asians in their neighborhoods, and Johnnie takes lessons from each place. By the time he finally decides to move in with his gay friend, Dick, he is much better equipped with self-awareness--but he has yet to make a decision about where his desires truly lie.

Patrice Lawrence

Laura Henry Allain-MBE

Poppy Bienias

Marlene Wylie

Colin Grant: Homecoming draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first post-war arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds. These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal a rich tapestry of Caribbean British lives.

Hazel V Carby: Moving between Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

Beryl Gilroy: Beryl Gilroy’s novel In Praise of Love and Children is hauntingly familiar yet refreshingly new in its outlook on the immigrant experience in England, racism, and celebration of life and culture. Written some thirty years ago, it is a 'history' that very much needed telling. The novel illuminates the challenges faced by the West Indian immigrant who elects to live in the seat of the empire. Cultural conflicts and the disintegration of the family are but a few of the results of the move. In the end, its style as well as the narrative itself posits the importance of the community above the concerns of the individual, while the novel also champions the welfare of children.

Aba Shanti

Lionel Ngakane: The friendship of a young white boy and a black girl reaches out across the generations in this uplifting mid-60s short, directed by South African-born actor and anti-Apartheid activist Lionel Ngakane. Against a background media narrative suggesting ever-worsening racial tensions, Jemima + Johnny offered a refreshingly optimistic take on black/white relations in a post-riots Notting Hill. Jemima + Johnny won its director an award at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, the first black British film to be so honoured.

Anthony Joseph: Combining life-writing with poetic prose, Anthony Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon Lord Kitchener.

Lord Kitchener

Clair Wills: The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country. Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience.

Errol John: Depicts the vibrant, cosmopolitan of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad – a world that is as harsh as it is filled with colour and warmth.

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: ***LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 JHALAK PRIZE***A leading new exploration of the Windrush generation featuring David Lammy, Lenny Henry, Corinne Bailey Rae, Sharmaine Lovegrove, Hannah Lowe, Jamz Supernova, Natasha Gordon and Rikki Beadle-Blair. For the pioneers of the Windrush generation, Britain was 'the Mother Country'. They made the long journey across the sea, expecting to find a place where they would be be welcomed with open arms; a land in which you were free to build a new life, eight thousand miles away from home.

Touching Bass with Errol: Join Errol and the Touching Bass family every month for regular voyages into inner-city, concrete jungle productions plus astral-facing funk, jazz, broken beat and anything else with a soulful pulse.

SV Emigrants from West Indies disembarking at Plymouth from the S.S. Colobie, onto tender. CU West Indian man disembarking. CU Another man disembarking. CU Pan, woman with floral dress on, disembarking. SCU Long haired West Indian man vaulting gangway. SCU A French sailor carrying child down gangway. SV Piled up luggage on deck. SCU Pan, West Indian people on tender as it approaches shore. LV Tender as it approaches shore, with English coastline in background.

John McLeod: London's histories of migration and settlement and the resulting diverse, hybrid communities have engendered new forms of social and cultural activity reflected in a wealth of novels, poems, films and songs. Postcolonial London explores the imaginative transformation of the city by African, Asian, Caribbean and South Pacific writers since the 1950s.

Horace Ové: Focusing on one family, this film dramatises the tensions between first and second generation West Indians in London. The younger generation see their parents as having rejected their black identity and, unable to get a job, the family's younger son becomes involved in collective black action.

Paul Mendez: Rainbow Milk is an intersectional coming-of-age story, following nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of a Jehovah's Witness upbringing and the legacies of the Windrush generation.

Stella Corradi: A shocking drama inspired by the Windrush scandal. After 50 years in the UK, Anthony Bryan is wrongfully detained by the Home Office and threatened with deportation.

Steven McQueen (CBE): Love letters to black resilience and triumph in London's West Indian community, directed by Oscar winner Steve McQueen. Vivid stories of hard-won victories in the face of racism.

Andrea Levy: Returning to England after the war Gilbert Joseph is treated very differently now that he is no longer in an RAF uniform. Joined by his wife Hortense, he rekindles a friendship with Queenie who takes in Jamaican lodgers. Can their dreams of a better life in England overcome the prejudice they face?

John Alexander: Filmed live during its sold-out run in 2019, the National Theatre’s epic production of Andrea Levy’s Orange Prize-winning novel is streaming with National Theatre at Home to mark Windrush Day 2020. Small Island embarks on a journey from Jamaica to Britain, through the Second World War to 1948 – the year the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury.

Caryl Phillips: Powerful and compelling, Strange Fruit by Caryl Phillips (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) is the story of a family caught between two cultures, and the uncrossable no man's land that can come between parents and their children.

George Lamming: Barbadian George Lamming came to England in 1950 on the same ship as fellow aspiring novelist Samuel Selvon; legend has it that the two shared a typewriter during the crossing. In 1953 Lamming published his acclaimed first novel In the Castle of My Skin depicting the unravelling of the colonial order and its unintended consequences for the inhabitants of Carrington Village, Barbados in the 1930s and 40s. Its sequel The Emigrants (1954) traces the life of the same protagonist – based on Lamming himself – as he travels to England.

Michael McMillan: The Front Room is a unique study by author Michael McMillan of the position of the home in different migrant groups. McMillan draws upon memories of his relatives' homes in the 1960s and 1970s to show a representation of his vision of the traditional West Indian front room and the symbolism of particular objects. McMillan examines how these rooms raise the issues of class, migration, aspiration, religion, alienation, family and the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial. The front room often provides an outlet to respond to the feelings of displacement, exile and alienation and the rebuilding of a home in a strange land. The Front Room discusses the groundings of the front room in Victoriana and colonialism, with memories from first-generation West Indians and second-generation Black British.

Sam Selvon: Amid grasping landlords, the temptations of spending money and the less-than-welcoming attitude of the Mother Country, can this motley group of hustlers and schemers, Trinidadians and Jamaicans, men and women make their dreams a reality? ‘Selvon’s meticulously observed narratives of displaced Londoners’ lives created a template for how to write about migrant, and postmigrant, London for countless writers who have followed in his wake, including Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith’ Caryl Phillips.

Sam Selvon/Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience – and one of the great twentieth-century London novels. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Susheila Nasta. At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry ‘Sir Galahad’ Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners – from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica – must try to create a new life for themselves.

Curtis Walker: The groundbreaking sketch show that brought the black British perspective to TV, packed with guest stars, music and razor-sharp comedy.

Tim Kirkby: David Olusoga opens secret government files to show how the Windrush scandal and the ‘hostile environment’ for black British immigrants has been 70 years in the making. The film features Sarah O’Connor, Anthony Bryan and Judy Griffith. Settled here legally since childhood, they were re-classified as illegal immigrants by new ‘hostile environment’ regulations. Unable to show proof of their nationality status, they lost jobs, savings and their health, facing deportation back to countries they could barely remember.

Amelia Gentleman: Amelia Gentleman's expose of the Windrush scandal shocked the nation, and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd as Home Secretary. Her tenacious reporting revealed how the government's 'hostile environment' immigration policy had led to thousands of law-abiding people being wrongly classified as illegal immigrants, with many being removed from the country, and many more losing their homes and their jobs.

The Vortext Jazz Club

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and David Dabydeen: 'This illuminating, vivid volume is a fitting tribute to the experiences of migration' - Hanif Kureishi Between the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act, half a million people came to the UK from the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, the story of the Windrush Generation is more widely known than ever. But is it the whole story?

Louise Hare: Atmospheric, poignant and compelling, Louise Hare's debut shows that new arrivals have always been the prime suspects. But, also, that there is always hope.

David Matthews: Voices of the Windrush Generation is a powerful collection of stories from the men, women and children of the Windrush generation - West Indians who emigrated to Britain between 1948 and 1971 in response to labour shortages, and in search of a better life.

Ian Sanjay Patel: Drawing on new archival material from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ian Sanjay Patel retells Britain’s recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a series of post-war immigration laws, Britain’s colonial and Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa were renamed immigrants. In the late 1960s, British officials drew upon an imperial vision of the world to contain what it saw as a vast immigration ‘crisis’ involving British citizens, passing legislation to block their entry.

Benjamin Zephaniah: In this heart-stopping adventure, Benjamin Zephaniah shows us what it was like to be a child of the Windrush generation. Leonard is shocked when he arrives with his mother in the port of Southampton. His father is a stranger to him, it's cold and even the Jamaican food doesn't taste the same as it did back home in Maroon Town.

James Berry: These poems gives voice to the people who came on the first ships from the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry - from Jamaica - was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. His new book explores the different reasons his fellow travellers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. This publication is linked with events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

Prison Radio Association: Windrush Stories was produced and presented by DJ Flight for Windrush Day 2020, with funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Sharon Watson, Ross MacGibbon: Phoenix Dance Theatre performs Sharon Watson’s Windrush: Movement of the People, the first contemporary dance work to explore the narrative of the arrival of SS Empire Windrush that brought the first Caribbean migrants to the UK.

Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips: Broadcaster Trevor Phillips and his novelist brother Mike retell the very human story of Britain's first West Indian immigrants and their descendants from the first wave of immigration in 1948 to the present day.