On Wednesday March 23rd we held the first in-person event of 2022 – a workshop for students at our London campus showcasing the work of our new project on Ignatius Sancho’s London. Sancho was one of the eighteenth century’s most important Black Britons – an entrepreneur, writer, composer and abolitionist whose letters written from his […]
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This project is still a work in progress and each day we’re finding more information about the people and places that made black London in World War II. If you’re a researcher who has found something we’ve missed, or perhaps if you know someone from your circle of family and friends who was in London […]
The Florence Mills Social Parlour
Amy Ashwood Garvey’s life would be remarkable by the standards of the twenty-first century let alone the first half of the twentieth. Born in Jamaica in the late 1800s, married to the most famous pan-African leader in the world in Harlem, and an active anti-colonial protestor as well as an entrepreneur in her own right, […]
A note on periodization
When did the Second World War start? On the surface this question is too easy even for a pub quiz. In the UK, most are familiar with Neville Chamberlain’s radio address on 3rd September 1939 dolefully telling the nation that the Nazi invasion of Poland had forced the British government to stand by its promise […]
An introduction to sources and method
As this introduction to the project explained, certain black people’s many and varied activities in the wartime city have been documented before. In this post, we’ll look at what we know so far and how using a GIS map helps join the dots in new ways, while introducing some of the new primary evidence on […]
A short introduction to Mapping Black London in WWII
The Second World War is hardly under-studied, to put it mildly. But there’s still a tendency to marginalize black people – as diverse a collection of individuals and communities as could be imagined – or skip them over altogether. This post delves into the reasons why the Mapping Black London in World War II project […]