Britain and Africa · London · Black British history

Brixton, Windrush Square and the Black Cultural Archives

Brixton did not become the capital of Black Britain by accident. It became it because of a labour exchange on Coldharbour Lane, an air-raid shelter under Clapham Common, landlords who would rent to no one else, and a community that stayed and fought back. Today its central square carries the name of a ship, and the country's national Black archive stands on it.

Overview: why Brixton

Black people have lived in London for centuries, as the stories of Ottobah Cugoano and the Black Poor on this site show. But modern Black Britain, as a large settled community, took shape after 1948, and its best-known address is Brixton in the borough of Lambeth, south London. Caribbean families came first, followed by West Africans from Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone and, later, Somalis and others. The streets around the market, Railton Road and Coldharbour Lane carry layer upon layer of that history: of work, of music, of policing and riots, and of the institutions people built for themselves.

Empire Windrush: docked at Tilbury on 21–22 June 1948; 492 Caribbean passengers in the official count
Clapham South deep shelter: temporary home for 236 of them; the nearest labour exchange was on Coldharbour Lane, Brixton
Windrush Square: formerly Brixton Oval and Tate Gardens; renamed in 1998 for the 50th anniversary
African and Caribbean War Memorial: unveiled on Windrush Square on 22 June 2017, the UK's first national memorial to African and Caribbean service personnel of both world wars
Black Cultural Archives: founded 1981; its home in Raleigh Hall, 1 Windrush Square, opened on 24 July 2014
Getting there: Brixton station (Victoria line and National Rail), a few minutes' walk from the square

Windrush, June 1948

The HMT Empire Windrush, a former German cruise ship taken by Britain as a war prize, called at Kingston, Jamaica in May 1948 on its way back from the Caribbean and Mexico. Passengers also boarded in Trinidad, Bermuda and elsewhere. It docked at Tilbury on the Thames late on 21 June and the passengers came ashore on 22 June. Many were former servicemen who had served Britain in the RAF and other forces during the war. They came as British subjects, with the legal right to live and work in the country they had been taught to call the "mother country".

Counts vary. The official Assistance Board figure was 492 Caribbean passengers, plus stowaways. The ship's full manifest of more than a thousand also included Polish displaced persons and others. Those with nowhere to go, 236 of them, were housed in the deep-level air-raid shelter under Clapham Common, 180 steps below ground. A Jamaican RAF veteran, Baron Baker, had suggested it. The nearest employment exchange was on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, less than a mile away. That one practical fact is a big part of why Brixton became the centre of Caribbean London.

Windrush was not the first ship. The Ormonde and the Almanzora had brought Caribbean workers in 1947. But Windrush became the symbol. Since 2018, 22 June has been marked as Windrush Day.

Settling in: work, rooms and "No Blacks"

The new arrivals found work quickly. London Transport, the new National Health Service, the Post Office and factories needed hands. Housing was another matter. Many landlords openly refused Black tenants, with notices reading "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs". People rented rooms in run-down Victorian houses from the few landlords who would take them, often at inflated prices, or pooled savings through "pardner" schemes to buy houses of their own. In the 1950s and 60s Brixton's big old houses filled with families from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and the other islands, and later from West Africa.

Brixton Market and Electric Avenue, one of the first shopping streets in London lit by electricity, became the place to find yams, plantain, saltfish and hot pepper. Sound systems, churches, barbershops and record shops followed. That is the Brixton most visitors see today, though high rents and redevelopment have pushed many longstanding families out.

Struggle and protest: 1981 and 1985

For Black Brixton, the 1970s and early 80s meant unemployment, poor housing and aggressive policing, especially the "sus" law, which let police stop and search people on mere suspicion. Activists organised. Olive Morris, a young Jamaican-born woman who grew up in Brixton, squatted at 121 Railton Road, helped found the Brixton Black Women's Group and campaigned against police harassment until her death in 1979 at just 27. Her face was chosen for the Brixton Pound note in 2009.

In April 1981, after a police operation called "Swamp 81" stopped and searched around a thousand people in days, Brixton exploded. Days of rioting followed, and Lord Scarman's report later blamed "racial disadvantage" and heavy-handed policing, though it rejected the charge of institutional racism. In September 1985, police shot Cherry Groce in her home during a raid looking for her son, leaving her paralysed, and Brixton rose again. An inquest in 2014 found police failings had contributed to her death in 2011. Each of these moments changed British policing law, at least on paper.

The same years show the other link in this site's story: the riots of 1919 in Cardiff and Liverpool, and the experience of Black seamen and soldiers between the wars. Read the 1919 race riots.

Windrush Square and its memorials

The open space in front of the Tate Library was long known as Brixton Oval, then Tate Gardens. In 1998, fifty years after the ship docked, Lambeth renamed it Windrush Square to recognise the African Caribbean community's contribution to the area. It was redesigned and reopened in 2010.

On 22 June 2017 the African and Caribbean War Memorial was unveiled here: the UK's first national memorial to service personnel of African and Caribbean origin who fought in the First and Second World Wars. It was devised by the Nubian Jak Community Trust, and had first been shown temporarily outside the Black Cultural Archives on Armistice Day 2014, with the Windrush veteran Sam King among those present. It stands in Scottish whinstone and Ancaster stone, in the heart of the square, and is free to visit at any time. A memorial to the victims of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa also stands on the square.

For the soldiers it remembers, see West African soldiers in the First World War and West African soldiers in Burma.

The Black Cultural Archives

The Black Cultural Archives (BCA) was founded in 1981, the year of the Brixton uprising, by a group including the educator and historian Len Garrison. They were worried that Black history in Britain was being ignored, or even denied, by schools and established institutions. For more than thirty years the collection lived in small premises. Then Raleigh Hall, a pair of Georgian houses from 1824 on Windrush Square that had stood derelict for years, was restored. Lambeth Council transferred it to the BCA on a 99-year peppercorn lease, and after a £7 million project it opened on 24 July 2014 as the UK's first national Black heritage centre.

The opening exhibition, Re-imagine: Black Women in Britain, told the stories of women from Mary Seacole and Mary Prince to Olive Morris. Since then the BCA has run exhibitions on Windrush, Black British art and much more, alongside its archive of personal papers, photographs, oral histories and organisation records. In 2015 the building was named London's best new building.

Address: 1 Windrush Square, Brixton, London SW2 1EF
Opening: usually Tuesday to Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday. Check the BCA's own site before you go, as hours and exhibitions change.
Entry: the building and many displays are free; some exhibitions and events are ticketed
Research: the archive reading room is open to researchers by appointment

The Windrush scandal

In 2017 and 2018 it emerged that people who had come to Britain legally as children in the Windrush years were being treated as illegal immigrants under the "hostile environment" policy. They had lived in Britain for decades, but many had never been given documents proving their status, and the Home Office had destroyed landing cards. They lost jobs, homes and access to the NHS; some were detained and some deported. The Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, resigned in April 2018. An independent review by Wendy Williams in 2020 found "institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness" on race at the Home Office, and a compensation scheme was set up, though many applicants have died waiting.

The scandal is why Windrush Day exists, and why a national Windrush monument by the Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson was unveiled at Waterloo station in 2022.

African Brixton

Brixton's story is often told as a purely Caribbean one, but West Africans have been part of it from early on. Students and workers from Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone lived here from the 1950s, and today the area's churches, shops and restaurants reflect a large African population alongside the Caribbean one. Read more on Ghanaians and Nigerians in Britain since the 1950s and the West African Students' Union.

Ghana-Net: the country many African Brixtonians call home
Explore Nigeria: Lagos and beyond
Sierra Leone on African Independence
Ghana Without Filters: honest guidance for the diaspora going back to Ghana

A Brixton walk

Brixton station: come out onto Brixton Road.
Windrush Square: a couple of minutes' walk south. See the African and Caribbean War Memorial and the Tate Library.
Black Cultural Archives: Raleigh Hall, on the square. Allow an hour or more.
Brixton Market and Electric Avenue: back across the road, through the covered arcades of Brixton Village and Market Row. Good for food.
Coldharbour Lane: the street of the old labour exchange where the Windrush passengers went for work.
Railton Road: the "Frontline" of the 1970s and 1981, where Olive Morris lived and organised.
Clapham South: one stop beyond Clapham Common on the Northern line. The deep shelter is occasionally opened for guided tours by the London Transport Museum.

Combine Brixton with the Imperial War Museum, also in Lambeth, or with the city's other Black history sites in our London hub.

Tours and experiences

Our tour partner offers guided walks and tours across London, and tours around Accra and the Ghanaian coast for those travelling the other way. Entrance fees are included in the tour price where a tour visits paying sites. Tips are not included but are always welcome.

The African side of the story

Britain Adventures is part of a network of independent sites on Africa and its history. These are the places where the stories on this page continue:

Pan-African: African Independence · Uganda · Egypt · Sierra Leone · All African Radio Stations
Ghana: Ghana-Net · Cape Coast Castle · Elmina Castle · James Fort, Accra · They Made Ghana · War Cemetery Cape Coast
Across Africa: Kenya Web News · Explore Nigeria · Gambia Vibes · Zambia Vibes
European history: V2 Rocket and Peenemünde · Tannenberg Memorial

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