Nicholas Boston
Associate Professor of Media Sociology
The City University of New York (CUNY), Lehman College
On 22 June, the UK will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush. This wartime ship has given its name to an entire generation of people who migrated from the Caribbean to Britain between 1948 and 1973. The Windrush story tends to be an androcentric one, beginning with the detail that over 200 male Empire Windrush passengers were accommodated temporarily in a former air raid shelter beneath Clapham Common, London, leading to neighouring Brixton blossoming into a Black enclave. But, what about Windrush women’s beginnings? The Clapham shelter is crucially central to the origin story of the Windrush generation as regards space and place, however, it cannot tell us anything about the experiences of women.
This multimedia presentation focuses on the Victoria League Colonial Girls’ Club, an all-female residence founded in 1945 at 18 Collingham Gardens S.W.5, a garden square in Earl’s Court, London. For a quarter century, 18 Collingham Gardens was the address at which thousands of Caribbean and Commonwealth women resided, either temporarily or long term, when they came to the UK as settlers, students, or sojourners.
If you have any questions about this talk, please contact Professor Bert Vaux.
