Two years in a rented room in north London turned a student into the man who would lead Ghana to independence. His London story, and where to find it today.
On a quiet street in Kentish Town, north London, a blue plaque marks an ordinary Victorian terraced house. It reads simply that Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana, lived there from 1945 to 1947. In that rented room, with a landlady who treated him like family, the man who would lead the first sub-Saharan African colony to independence spent two of the most important years of his life.
Nkrumah came to London as a student. He left it as a political organiser, with a network that stretched across West Africa, a programme for independence, and the attention of the British security services. This page follows him through the city, and shows you where you can still find his traces.
Nkrumah's first sight of London came in 1935, when he sailed from Takoradi to Liverpool on his way to university in the United States and spent a few weeks in the capital waiting for his American visa. In his autobiography he described the moment that turned a student into a nationalist: walking through London and seeing newspaper sellers shouting that Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, the one independent African empire. He wrote that it felt as if the whole of London had declared war on him personally.
He then spent ten years in America, studying at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, preaching in Black churches, working in shipyards and soap factories, and organising African students. By 1945 he was ready to come back across the Atlantic, closer to home.
Nkrumah arrived in London in May 1945, just as the war in Europe ended. He carried a letter of introduction from the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James to James's old friend George Padmore, who met him at the station. It was the start of a partnership that shaped African history: Padmore, the experienced organiser and journalist, and Nkrumah, the younger man with energy and charisma.
Nkrumah enrolled at the London School of Economics to work on a doctorate, and also at University College London, and he joined Gray's Inn to read law. He attended the LSE only briefly. Politics took over almost at once.
Finding a room was not easy for a Black man in post-war London, where many landlords openly refused African and Caribbean tenants. After weeks of searching Nkrumah found a room at 60 Burghley Road, a quiet residential street in Kentish Town, and stayed from June 1945 until November 1947.
He remembered those years as happy ones. His landlady, Florence Manley, said she looked on him "as a member of my family", and she opened her home to the stream of friends and fellow activists who came to see him. The West African Students' Union had its hostel and headquarters a short walk away in Camden Square, and Padmore's flat in Cranleigh Street, Somers Town, was a bus ride south.
In 2005 English Heritage put up a blue plaque on the house. It is one of the few places in London where Ghanaian visitors can stand in front of a building directly tied to the founding of their nation.
Within months of arriving Nkrumah had been elected vice-president of the West African Students' Union and regional secretary of the Pan-African Federation, and made joint secretary of the committee organising the Fifth Pan-African Congress. In October 1945 he was in Manchester, where he drafted the congress's declaration calling on colonial workers, farmers and intellectuals to organise for independence.
Back in London he founded the West African National Secretariat, with activists from both the British and the French West African colonies, to campaign for independence and West African unity. He edited its newspaper, The New African, spoke at meetings of Black workers and left-wing groups around Britain, and kept up a heavy correspondence with nationalists at home. Much of the planning happened at Padmore's kitchen table in Cranleigh Street, where African leaders of a whole generation came and went.
All of this was watched. Because of his contacts with Communists and radicals, the British security services kept a file on Nkrumah in London and passed it on to the colonial authorities when he went home.
In 1947 a group of lawyers and businessmen in the Gold Coast, led by J. B. Danquah, founded the United Gold Coast Convention to press for self-government. They needed a full-time organiser and, on the recommendation of Ako Adjei, who knew him from America and London, they invited Nkrumah to be their general secretary.
He accepted. On 14 November 1947 he sailed from Liverpool with his friend Kojo Botsio, and on 10 December he landed at Takoradi after twelve years away. Within months the Gold Coast was shaken by the 1948 riots, Nkrumah was arrested, and by 1949 he had broken with the Convention to found his own Convention People's Party. In 1951 he became Leader of Government Business, in 1952 Prime Minister, and on 6 March 1957 he led Ghana to independence.
He came back to London many times as a head of government, to Commonwealth conferences and meetings with the Queen. But the student years in Kentish Town were where his politics took shape.
All five can be visited in a half-day by Tube and on foot. Add the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton for the wider story of Black Britain in the twentieth century.
The Nkrumah and Padmore plaques are outdoors and can be seen at any time; both buildings are private homes. Guided walks of Black London history cover several of these places. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
Most visitors fly into Accra International Airport. In Accra you can visit the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, where he is buried on the spot where he declared independence, the Old Polo Ground, and the George Padmore Research Library. In the Western Region, his birthplace has the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum at Nkroful.
The week that planned Africa's independence.
Nkrumah's first political home in Britain.
From trading forts to the colony that became Ghana.
The communities that followed.
A Gold Coast campaigner in London, 160 years earlier.
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