Tag: Windrush Day

Orange Street has a mystical place in Reggae’s history. Set in the heart of downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Even to this day it stands somehow locked in time & space. The beat of the music ever changing & evolving. As politics, religion even the weather effect its course one thing remains a constant, Orange Street is central to the islands musical story. The Ska era of Jamaica’s sound time has told us can be dated from around 1962 to late 1966. The instigators being the big three producers of this period, Clement Coxonne Dodd, Prince Buster & Duke Reid.

The Rocksteady sound which ran a shorter more intense race between 1966 to 1968 would be Duke Reid’s to command.. … More

Both devastating & funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience – & one of the great 20th-century London novels. 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 & shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold & 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 … More

Homecoming draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings & memoirs by the women & men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s& 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, & Carnival Queens in Leeds.

These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal … More