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This research project explores the conscious erasure of the contributions of Black and Asian Britons from our national heritage. The researcher’s pending application for the expeditious inclusion of Bridge Park Community Centre, a little-known but nationally significant heritage site in north-west London, on England’s National Heritage List, serves as its starting point. Central to the researcher’s argument is the way in which our national heritage, both through its insidious relationship to national identity and in the way it interacts with other racialised regimes of representation, such as news media, is used to construct certain boundaries of belonging that include some and intentionally exclude others in a racialised process of ‘Othering’.
Platforms Piece is believed to be the first sculptural representation of black Britons in a public art context in England and was granted listed status in an ongoing effort to tackle the underrepresentation of black British history in our heritage.
On 30 July 1948, the British Nationality Act received royal assent, defining British citizenship for the very first time and doing so in globally expansive terms.
(Photo by author. National Archives)
The arrival of Empire Windrush from Jamaica in June of 1948 marked the symbolic start of Britain’s postwar immigration boom.
In 1956, a series of photographs of Caribbean newcomers passing through British custom ports appeared in Picture Post alongside an article titled ‘Thirty Thousand Colour Problems’.
(Picture Post. June 1956. British Library)
A newspaper headline about the 1981 Brixton uprising published by the Sun.
(The Sun. 6 July 1981)