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A new history of multicultural Britain
00:42:34
Kieran Connell offers a fresh look at Britain's multicultural history in the years after the Second World War – from Cardiff docks to Birmingham cafes
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Kieran Connell
Hello friends, Guess who?
- [00:46]
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That's right, it is I, the Replacer.
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Kieran Connell
Once again, I've been called on so you can play the new Call of Duty Black Ops 7 with three expansive.
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Kieran Connell
Zombie gameplay you've ever freakin seen.
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Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now.
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Kieran Connell
Rated M for Mature.
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. When we think of Britain's multicultural past, we often think of the arrival of HMT Windrush in Tilbury Docks in 1948, and of the impact of policies issued from Westminster. And both of those factors are hugely important. But there are other stories to be told, too, of community gatherings and pubs and cafes, of complicated romances and sexual relationships, and of people embarking on new lives in new towns. Kieran Connell's book Multicultural Britain, chart some of these stories and I spoke to him to find out more. Kieran, thank you so much for being with us today to talk about your new book. I am Sometimes loathe to start an interview talking about the definition of a term, but in this instance it feels like it's really central. Can you talk a little bit about the term multiculturalism and I suppose how that phrase, how that term has come to stand in for a wider set of concerns?
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Kieran Connell
I suppose, Yeah, I feel like there's a huge amount of confusion around what that term means. I think partly some of the problem may be because it has that kind of ism attached to it. So it sounds like a philosophy like Marxism or something like that. And so it's almost become, I think, in the minds of some people, almost like a doctrine that people either do or do not believe in. So, you know, people can talk about multiculturalism and they're actually talking about immigration or they can be talking about multiculturalism and they're actually talking about education in schools and the kind of syllabus that we should in our schools or that we do have in our schools. And I guess what I wanted to do with my book is reclaim that term in a slightly different way. And instead of talking about the policies that are associated with multiculturalism. For example, in the 1970s and 80s in Britain, local governments in places like London and Birmingham introduced various policies, for example, to allow religious minorities to celebrate particular festivals in school or to learn about particular religious minorities in school, et cetera. I want to move the conversation though, away from the question of like policies and instead focus on the actual experience of living in a society that between the end of the Second World War up to and including the present day, has become ever more ethnically diverse. So I'm really interested in like the actual social experience of increasing ethnic diversities. In the book, I call it actually existing multiculturalism or everyday multiculturalism. That kind of day to day experience of living in a society that's becoming more and more diverse and that that story begins really in Britain's major cities, largely in the inner area of those cities. Like. So I grew up in a place called Borsal Heath, which is an inner city area of Birmingham. You know, in the, in the 80s and 90s and up to the present day, it's one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the country. But that story is now spreading far and wide. You know, it's spreading to places like towns, seaside towns, resorts, even rural villages. They're also becoming much more ethnically diverse. So it's a story that really gets to the heart to some of the changes that modern Britain has sort of, I guess, lived through over the period of the last 70 years, really.
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Podcast Host
And in tracing that journey, your book stops off at particular places at particular times, and we'll get into some of those as we go. Before we do that, though, is it possible to trace back the point at which the term multiculturalism did become this loaded, this contested term?
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Kieran Connell
It kind of was loaded almost from the moment that it was started. It was imported from the United States to begin with in the 1970s and it was imported, as I mentioned earlier, by quite progressive left wing councils who felt that the problem with discriminations, Islamophobia, other types of discrimination, these progressive councils felt that those problems were so acute that they needed to take much more drastic action to try and make room for, I guess, a celebration of ethnic diversity. I guess one of the founding principles of multiculturalism in that form, in that context, is that, you know, you shouldn't have to hide away from your difference, whether that's religious difference, cultural difference or any other kind of difference. Instead, you know, councils in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, elsewhere started to make funds available for particular minority groups to, I don't know, like run a festival in the community or to put on an exhibition about their experiences. But the problem was that because of the way it was phrased and because of the focus, I think, on ethnic minority groups immediately attracted controversy from opponents who saw it in almost in zero sum games. So there was a sense among the opponents of multiculturalism in the 70s and 80s in Britain that if black and ethnic minority populations are gaining over there, that must mean that white groups must be losing over here. And so almost from the moment these policies started to be introduced, because they were sort of packaged as being aimed primarily at black and minority and ethnic groups, it led to a lot of dissatisfaction among political opponents and amongst some white communities as well. And one of the big points, sort of the big selling points, I think, of the book, the big points that I try to communicate is that that's really done a disservice to the debate because there's a huge amount of ethnic diversity among white populations as well. And I'm a case in point for that. So one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book, well, two reasons really. One was this experience of growing up in inner city Birmingham as one of maybe two or three white kids in my school, and sort of growing up in that primary school environment, just assuming that diversity and difference was just part of the course, normal, not seeing it as a very big deal at all, kind of having a very organic respect really, for cultural difference. When you grow up in an environment like that on the one hand, but on the other hand, you know, I've got immigration in my family history. My great grandparents moved from County Cork to England in the early 20th century. I've also got German heritage, so my maternal grandmother moved from Germany to Morecambe in Lancashire. And that will be true, as I say, for a lot of people listening to this podcast, but I think it's never really kind of talked about or referenced in this debate about multiculturalism. And so one of my big conclusions is that one of the ways out, I think, of this quite toxic debate that we often have in this country around these questions, is to have a much more encompassing, inclusive conversation about what it means to be multicultural.
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Podcast Host
Staying with the idea of perhaps rethinking or unpicking shorthands about things. The Empire Windrush, the arrival of that in 1948, has come to be a kind of shorthand for the start of ethnic diversity in Britain. Are there ways in which you think we need to complicate that shorthand or recontextualise that part of this story?
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Kieran Connell
Sure, yes. But I think it's a really good thing that the Windrush has become so much more well known than it was even 20 years ago. Most people now have heard of the Windrush generation, and that can only be a good thing because it definitely references the kind of crucial contributions made by people from former British colonies in the Caribbean. 500 or so arrived on the Empire Windrush in Tilbury docks in the summer of 1948 and went on to make pathbreaking contributions to the establishment of the National Health Service, for example. Cultural contributions as well as economic contributions. I think, you know, modern Britain would look incredibly different and in my view would be a lot worse had it not been for the contributions made by the Windrush generation. But I think it also has resulted in problems because people sort of assume that the year zero for ethnic diversity began with the docking of that boat at tilbury docks in 1948. And that's not true. And one of the things that I show in the book is that, you know, ethnic diversity has been a long standing presence in Britain going back all the way to the 19th century, and it's not just associated with London. So I start the book with a chapter on Cardiff, and I don't think that Cardiff has really had the same recognition in Britain as obviously as London and the Windrush generation. It's not somewhere necessarily seen by people as being an important site in the making of multicultural Britain, but quite the opposite. It's true, because of its status as a port city, it was Britain's biggest exporter of coal in the 19th century. And if you're exporting coal and conversely, if you're importing other goods to Britain, what do you need? Well, you need laborers to need seamen to man those ships. And for that reason, a lot of the seamen were, would have been recruited from Britain's then colonies in the 19th century. And they ended up settling, you know, having docked in Cardiff, maybe got into a relationship with a local woman, maybe kind of enjoyed the quality of life there. There's a lot of work to be had on the ships, ended up settling in in a place called Tiger Bay, which is the docks area of Cardiff. And Tiger Bay has this incredible history as this being this remarkably kind of vibrant, diverse place which attracted a lot of negative attention from the outside. It was seen as being a place of vice or a place of criminality and other types of social issues. But within this very small area, this kind of square mile area, you had this stunning breadth of diversity. You had, you know, Jamaican seamen, Arabic seamen, African seamen. And some of the earliest mixed race relationships in Britain took place in the context of Tiger Bay. Now again, that attracted a lot of negative attention. There was a huge amount of anxiety in Britain about the consequences of people being in mixed race relationships. This was a time in the 19th century and early 20th century where of course, you know, the belief in distinct human race was a prominent feature of the fabric of Britain and it really underpinned the whole imperial project. And so if you have white women entering into sexual relationships with black men, the alarming thing for British people in the 19th century was the prospect of a population of what they called at the time, quote unquote, half caste children, what we'd call today mixed race people. But I kind of see that as being almost the vanguard, if you like, of the story of multicultural Britain. Right now in 2025, people from mixed race backgrounds is the fastest growing ethnicity in the country. And few, if any people have any kind of problems with that as a social phenomena. So it's a good illustration of how the story of the making of multicultural Britain kind of takes us to places that we might not necessarily expect to go to.
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Podcast Host
Stay in Cardiff a little longer because I think this story is fascinating. Do you think the examples that you include and some of which you mentioned there highlight the importance of love and of intimacy in this story in a way that is sometimes pushed to the sidelines?
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Kieran Connell
Definitely. I mean, that's one of the threads that runs all the way through the book, which is that when we're talking about the making of multicultural Britain, often the people who were, as I said, the vanguard on the front line of that story were white working class women living in working class areas like Tiger Bay, for example, finding themselves living next door to newly arrived men, be them from the Caribbean or from Africa or from elsewhere, and forming intimate relationships with them. And in the 1940s and 1950s, even into the 1960s, that was a difficult thing to do. And one of the things I try and shine the spotlight on is the experiences of those couples at different points in time and the experiences also of their children, who were also the focus of a lot of stigma. And that's kind of why I think it's important in this conversation, in this history, to focus on the experiences of quote, unquote, ordinary people. You know, I'm a social historian, so that's kind of where my big interest is. And these are people who by and large don't tend to leave like, much in the way of, like, archival traces behind. You have to be very creative to be able to like, rescue those people's experiences. I'm not talking about people with great wealth. I'm not talking about people with much in the way of power in this story. But we are talking about people who are, you know, often in the absence of any constructive assistance from the government. Now, the government didn't, you know, in 1948 or any period subsequently really set out a program for how to live in a multicultural society. You should do this, that or the other. You should do X, Y or Z. Therefore, it was left to often largely working class communities to try and work out how to do that in quite a haphazard way. So I don't suggest it was a happy go lucky story. Sometimes multiculturalism is seen as being kind of like. You can sometimes walk away from it with this narrative of steel bands, samosas and saris is kind of like happy go lucky story. And that's not a story that I'm telling in this book. The story that I'm telling in this book is often very messy. I've got a chapter, for example, which talks about the very problematic relationships that some immigrant men formed with white sex workers in Birmingham in the 1960s. Obviously, racism's a big part of the story as well. That's not something that one could ever shy away from in the story of multicultural Britain. But having said all that, there is this sense that it was, however haphazard it was, however messy it Was it was nevertheless kind of quote, unquote, ordinary working class people who were on the front line in this story of how Britain became multicultural to pick up on.
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Podcast Host
This idea a bit more. You write in the book that a key factor of this story is the spatial element of Britain's multicultural drift, which is a really striking phrase. Can you talk us through the ways in which the built environment or the lived experience in that built environment across time is so important to when we think about people's stories?
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Kieran Connell
Yeah, I mean, like many of your listeners will probably be listening to this podcast right now with headphones in, walking around the streets of London or Birmingham or Manchester or wherever it is they're living. And I encourage them, as they do, just to have a look at the kind of topographical, the built landscape of the streets they're walking around. And as your listeners do that, you can't help but be aware that that built landscape, the buildings, the kind of shops, the takeout joints, the restaurants, the cafes, they're all symbols of the extent to which Britain has become a multicultural landscape society. That's become normal in most UK cities. Even where I'm speaking to you from right now in Belfast in Northern Ireland, which doesn't have that same history of migration, but it's moving in that direction. That wasn't the case in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. So when migrants, largely from Britain's colonies and former colonies, moved to Britain in large numbers following the end of the Second World War, what often happened, for a variety of reasons, they were forced to live in the pretty dilapidated, rundown inner city areas of Britain's major cities. So places like, if your listeners are listening, London places like Brixton or Borsal Heath in Birmingham, Handsworth in Birmingham or, you know, Manningham in Bradford, St. Anne's in Nottingham, these were areas that had poor quality housing. They were kind of reasonably close to the kind of factories and foundries where many immigrant men in particular found work. But they're also quite hostile environments as well. So this was a period in the 40s and 50s where it was completely legal for a pub landlord, let's say, to put a sign on his or her pub that said, no blacks. No blacks, no dogs, no Irish. That's the kind of classic example of that that was totally legal until 1965. And what that meant was that when these migrants arrived and realized within a couple of years that their dreams of maybe staying in Britain for a short period of time, earn their money and then go back to their countries of Origin when they realized that dream was not going to happen. For a combination of reasons, it became necessary then to try and put down roots. And one of the ways in which the migrants put down roots was to establish places that would be almost safe spaces away from the kind of hostile environment of the outside world. So, for example, often would be cafes. So I love these cafes that I write about in 1960s Birmingham. Two of them. One called the Cafe Kashmir, one called the Piaka Sagar. So these were places where you could go for a meal cooked in traditional South Asian style. That was important, but actually more important, there were safe spaces away from the outside world. And there were also places where people could sort of find out information about how you could earn a living in Britain. Where were the factories or foundries which didn't have what was called at the time a color bar, which were open to black or South Asian employees? Where were the landlords that would rent you a room? There were also places where South Asian immigrants in particular often played music, play the sitar or the tableau, or sort of develop the kind of traditional bangra songs that they would have played back home in the Indian subcontinent. For the Irish, conversely, it was pubs. Pubs played a crucial role for the Irish because pubs were places, again, there were social spaces where you can meet, if not friends and friends of friends or people who came from a similar neck of the woods to you, which was really, really important in the context of moving, uprooting yourself from your home, from your family, from your community ties to a completely new environment. But they were also sort of like informal, I guess you might think of them a little bit like job centers, where, for the Irish, Irish men, a lot of the jobs they found would have been on building sites. And the word of mouth about where those building sites were, where you could find jobs spread in the pub. And so what you see is the built landscapes of British cities slowly beginning to change from the late 1940s onwards. And I think it's quite interesting that a lot of these establishments were called things like the Kashmir, because what does that signify to you? It signifies we're here to stay. We're putting down roots, putting down a marker. We're not going anywhere. And in the context of the 1960s, when you're talking about increased levels of political hostility towards migrants. So, you know, the 1960s was the period of Enoch Powell, his Rivers of Blood speech. In the 1970s, you had the National Front marching on the streets, and their policy was the enforced repatriation of war migrants back to their countries of origin. I think establishing your cafe or your restaurant, in some cases it was cinemas, pubs, etc, and calling them things like the Cafe Cashmere is a really kind of powerful and poignant sort of like, signal that we are here to stay.
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Podcast Host
Are there any other of those places that you would particularly like to visit, if you could?
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Kieran Connell
I really wish I could go back in time and go to those cafes at the peak of their powers. So there is this one cafe where I grew up called the Sri Kada, which was established in the 60s, so it would have been around in the 1960s, same building. And I go to it, like, whenever I go back home to Birmingham, I go to it to this day and it's like, it's very evocative. You know, there's kind of lots of pictures of some of the former owners and proprietors on the wall. And it also sells really, really cheap samosas too, which is always great. But in the 60s and 70s, it was a completely different vibe in these cafes. You know, they would have been sites of music. There would also have been sites of sexual liaisons as well, between sex workers and single immigrant men. And that's not a glib comment to make because these relationships definitely were problematic. But it's also, you know, if you put your mind in the experience of being a single immigrant man who's moved from the Indian subcontinent, often from very rural homelands, not speaking much English, arriving into Britain, often sharing a house with up to, you know, six, seven, eight, nine other single men, very little privacy. Those relationships between single immigrant men at a time before families had been brought over, before religion had become kind of a more established feature of the scene, those relationships did play a really important role for single immigrant men, as problematic as they obviously were in different ways. So Tiger Bay likewise has some amazing stories that are kind of unearthed from these pubs that took place that were very prominent meeting points in Tiger Bay and Cardiff. The interesting thing about Tiger Bay and Cardiff is you've got seamen who have just come off from a long period at sea, they've just been paid and they want to have a good time. And that involves, you know, hard drinking, sexual liaisons, no doubt, a bit of violence as well. And once the polls have closed at 11 o', clock, and I think that just to be a fly in the wall in those kinds of establishments would have been an incredible thing to have been able to do.
- [21:40]
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Kieran Connell
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Kieran Connell
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- [22:48]
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Kieran Connell
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- [23:15]
Podcast Host
Another of your chapters explores the Nottingham of the 1950s. What tensions came to the fore at this point in time and in this place?
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Kieran Connell
Yeah, so Nottingham, unlike Cardiff, so Cardiff's like diversity goes back to the 19th century. Nottingham's diversity was really something that only started to grow after the end of the Second World War and following the passing of the 1948 British Nationality Act, a really important piece of legislation because it gave everybody who lived in Britain's colonies and former colonies, so it applied to the Indian subcontinent which achieved their independence in 1947, gave them the equal right to live and work in Britain as anybody born in the United Kingdom. And the reason why that act was passed was because Britain had a crippling labour shortage. There wasn't enough laborers partly due to the loss of life caused by the Second World War. Two carry out the post war Labour government's really ambitious plans to, you know, establish a national health Service to rebuild Britain's crumbling infrastructure. And so workers from Britain's colonies and former colonies were used by the British government to carry out those tasks. And so Nottingham, it's diversity still pretty small in the 50s, about 3,000 people from the Caribbean, really not massive numbers, but concentrated for a variety of Reasons largely in the St. Anne's district. And I think what's interesting about Nottingham in the 50s is, you see, as I talked about, those relationships forming between different sections of the community, and that provoked in 1958, the spark for the first real outbreak of race rioting that took place in the late 20th century in 1958 was sparked in the St. Anne's area of Nottingham by the animosity that local white people had towards these number of relationships that form between black men and white women. And that, you know, that provoked days of unrest on two separate weekends. It's remarkable when you look at the reporting, thinking about the moment that we're living through right now, obviously, with rioting having re emerged in Britain in recent times. You know, in 1958, you had hundreds of white men going around shouting chants of things like, let's lynch them, talking about wanting to attack the black community. Bricks through windows, physical attacks. And it was an incredibly scary time to be Black in 1958 in Nottingham. And then a couple of weeks later, even more serious outbreak of rioting along similar lines took place in the Notting Hill area of London. And it was interesting what happened there for a number of different reasons. First of all, thinking about the shock that migrants would have felt when feeling like they're being threatened, anytime they walk around a corner, a group of men assembled on the corner could be a potential threat. Bricks through windows. You know, there's stories of some people sleeping with milk bottles by their bed just in case a brick comes through their window and they've got something to throw back. There's stories of immigrants talking about maybe emigrating to France, maybe France would be safer for them. But what's also remarkable about what happened in 1958, in the summer of 1958, both in Nottingham and Notting Hill, is that here you have a group of British citizens essentially invited to Britain by the government to rebuild Britain's crumbling infrastructure. Yet no statement was made by the government, no government official visited the St Anne's in Nottingham to kind of like, you know, reassure people. There was no kind of like strong leadership from the top that the type of racism that had been witnessed on the streets of St Anne's and Notting Hill was beyond the pale and couldn't be allowed to continue. And so in the absence of that leadership, and that's a strong. That's kind of a recurring theme in this story, really. It's the kind of shadow which is like cast over the book, is either the lack of leadership given by government officials or in some cases, the way in which government officials actually sometimes made the problem worse by seeking to kind of ape the language of the far right. And so in the absence of that, it became incredibly important for fledgling black communities in Britain to sort of, I guess, close ranks and re establish safe spaces that they could use in the context of what had become, you know, not just a hostile environment, but a very threatening environment. So, for example, Notting Hill Carnival, a lot of your listeners will have gone to that. That was established in response to the Nightingale riots of 1958. And it was sort of designed to sort of reassure Caribbean migrants in Britain that there was a network of like minded people, a network of supportive people who would be able to resist this kind of overt racism that had manifested itself in the streets of two major British cities. For me as a historian, the bizarre thing, the bizarre lesson that the British government learned from what happened in 1958 was not that there was a problem of racism in British society, rather the lesson they learned was that there was too much black immigration. And so what you see in the late 50s is more and more calls from politicians that, you know, the situation needed to be controlled. There needs to be a new piece of legislation that kind of chipped away. If you remember, I Talked about the 1948 British Nationality act, politicians argued that that principle of anybody who was born in Britain's colonies and former colonies could in theory move to Britain and work in Britain and have the same rights, enjoy the same rights as anybody born in the uk. People started to argue that needed to be curtailed. And so the first piece of legislation that was introduced that restricted immigration came as a result of the 1958 racist riots. And the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants act was explicitly designed to stop black and South Asian migrants specifically from coming to Britain. So it's been highlighted by a lot of historians as being a particularly discriminatory act. The reason being the way the government sold that act was by saying, look, there's too many immigrants coming in who are, quote, unquote, unskilled, like manual labourers coming in. And so what we're going to do is we're going to make it harder for manual laborers to come to Britain. But if migrants have got a skill that doctors or nurses, they're still more than welcome to come. So it's absolutely fine, just about stopping manual labours because we feel like we've got enough of those. But this is where you get to see the real motivation behind the act. Although the government claimed it was designed to restrict manual labourers The Irish were exempt from that piece of legislation. Now, the Irish were the biggest immigrant group in Britain at that time, and the vast majority of Irish immigrants were also manual labourers. The key distinction between Irish immigration and Caribbean or South Asian immigration is that the Irish are white. And so that was the reason why many commentators at the Time described that 1962 act as being a nakedly discriminatory piece of legislation.
- [29:43]
Podcast Host
I wanted to pick up on some of the impact of that kind of legislation later on. Before we do, are there any other common themes that we can trace between moments when there's been a backlash to multiculturalism or, I suppose, concerns about it?
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Kieran Connell
I went into researching this book with a kind of primary focus that it would be a social history and a foregrounding the experiences of ordinary people. I didn't expect to find the theme of the government, whichever government we're talking about, whether it's Labour or Conservative, how often over the decades, they've adopted virtually the exact same tactic when trying to deal with whether it's extreme right, far right or in some cases, whether it's literal neo Nazis. So whether we're talking about, just mentioned there, the 1958 riots, that was the time when Oswald Mosley, kind of veteran fascist, founder of the British Union of Fascists, he was very much active in whipping up tensions in Notting Hill in the late 1950s. The government response to that was to introduce those immigration controls in 1962. When we get to the 1970s, talking about the National Front, their policy, as I mentioned, was the enforced repatriation of all migrants back to their country of origin. In 1978, as the then leader of the Conservative Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, sort of gave a very famous interview where she sympathized with people potentially voting for the National Front. She sympathized with people who felt like their communities, to use her words, were becoming swamped by people of a different culture. She didn't bring the policies of the National Front into her party, but she did, or was seen by historians almost like copy the language of the National Front in using that type of language. And then just to give you another example from the late 1990s, early 2000s, that was the time when the National Front had receded, gone away, basically, but the BNP kind of the successor organization of the National Front at the time, led by Nick Griffin. Likewise, the response of the Labour government at that time was to try and peel off people who might be gravitating towards the far right by again using the type of language used by the bnp. At that time and bring in increasingly tough policies to deal with asylum seekers and migration more generally. In each case, though, the lesson for me in terms of the lesson of history, is that the protagonists of policies like that argue, well, if we don't address these issues, then people will vote for genuinely extreme parties and we don't want people to vote for those extreme, extreme parties. But the lesson from history is that those extreme parties haven't gone away, they haven't gone anywhere. They've been a really influential part of British political culture without ever having won power in any formal way, in most cases, not without having even won a seat at Parliament. So just by being kind of like in the background, it's resulted in this shift of the boundaries of what's seen as being acceptable language and acceptable ways of talking about race and immigration. The other thing is that I would say the making of multicultural Britain is often a really contradictory thing. It's never, and this is true for any history, really, but it's not history that sort of progresses really neatly in a linear line. On the one hand, you see the remarkable transformation of Britain, cities and towns, in actually quite a short historical period. Talking about a 70 year period, really, where I think right now it's not going to be long before we even need a new language to talk about ethnic diversity in the context, for example, of, you know, cities like Birmingham and Leicester which have majority minority populations, we're soon going to need a new vocabulary to talk about that. Likewise, when you think about how common it now is for people to have some kind of migration in their family history, whether it's parents, grandparents, great grandparents, what have you. You know, the cultural theorist Stuart hall, he once said, whenever I ask somebody nowadays where they're from, I expect to hear a really long story. Yet at the same time as that diversity is becoming ever more and more and more commonplace, also have the backlash to it. And we also have the opponents of diversity and the opponents of immigration, you know, seemingly becoming at different points in time and certainly in the present day, ever more influential on the political debate, to use a kind of fancy term. I almost see it as being like a dialectical process where you have these two different forces, opposite forces, rubbing up against one another and kind of like being pushed in different directions. And there's some total of that struggle of that clash is what we have today, where Britain has become far more diverse than it's ever been. You know, a third of people in England either themselves or have family members who are immigrants. You know, we have the most ethnically diverse cohort in history that began School in 2020. You know, we have a situation whereby within a few years time, there'll be no one left with any memory of the twin processes of migration and multiculturalism. Yet we also have this really kind of like contested terrain where it seems like we're going from one week to the next, where someone's talking about multiculturalism and immigration and portraying it as being in crisis. And that's one thing that has characterised the debate about immigration and multiculturalism for decades, is it's always seen as being a crisis.
- [34:45]
Podcast Host
One of the places you talk about in your book is Birmingham and you've written about the fact that there is an amazing unseen archive of photographs of that area in the 1960s that was a key inspiration in writing this book. Can you talk us through those? Why they were so inspiring and if there are any particular images that you think are particularly emblematic of this story.
- [35:04]
Kieran Connell
I could talk all day about these photographs if I had the time. It was a once in a career discovery. So this was a photographer who wasn't even at that time a professional photographer. She was an American student who had moved to Birmingham to study at the university and was studying this kind of unusual degree called Cultural studies, which at the time was very experimental and kind of like you could kind of make of it what you wanted to do. So she decided what she wanted to do was rather than spend her time on the kind of leafy, quite middle class campus at the University of Birmingham, she wanted to spend her time instead taking photographs of the inner city area of Birmingham, Borsal Heath that I subsequently went to school in 30 years later. And so she took thousands and thousands of photographs documenting this community in this really vibrant state of flux of newly arrived migrants were making lives to themselves. And the amazing thing about these photographs is, well, first of all, what you see going back to the conversation that we were having before about the built environment, she's photographing that built environment and she's not just photographing the outside of these kind of cafes or pubs or cinemas, she's going inside them as well. And bear in mind, she was, you know, 22, 23 years old, from a white, middle class, Jewish background, wandering around this working class, inner city, industrialized area with two cameras. You know, took a lot of courage to do some of the things that she was doing. And part of me thinks as well that because she was an outsider, because she was American, people maybe were somehow more willing to open up to her because they viewed her as being somebody not necessarily like immersed in some of the. The prejudices and assumptions that people from within Britain would have had at that time. But the truly phenomenal thing about her work, in my view, is that she managed to befriend really very intimately this young, young woman called Kathleen, whose parents were from Ireland. So her parents were Irish migrants. She was from a working class background, she lived in Borsal Heath. And the photographer, Janet Mendelssohn, really became so close to her that she was present at the birth of Kathleen's two children. There are these amazing photographs of Kathleen in the hospital having just given birth to a son and to a daughter. And this is where, again, circles back to the conversation that we were having about relationships. What I think part of what these photographs reveal is it gives us a really interesting glimpse into the sexual, intimate relationships that were being formed between local white women and newly arrived black or South Asian men. So Kathleen's partner was a man called Salim. Not their real names. You know, they had two kids together at time, and still mixed race relationships were very much kind of taboo. But you can see from the photographs, there's one photograph of Kathleen, she's cooking something. You can see she's really paying a lot of attention to how she's cooking this meal. And I subsequently met Kathleen and she said, well, she was learning how to cook Indian cuisine. She dyed her hair black because she wanted to copy the actresses that were being watched by her partner in South Asian migrants, Bollywood movies. So she sort of did her makeup in that kind of classic Bollywood style and dyed her hair black to try and mimic a South Asian style. She was hanging out in these cafes in places like the Cafe Kashmir, and began to be immersed in this incredibly diverse, multicultural kind of cultural scene. And so we can see from that just the way in which one particular couple are working out some of these complexities of actually existing multiculturalism. Now, their relationship. As I talk about in the book, it's quite unclear exactly what the dynamics of their relationship were and put it like that. And her partner Salim actually died shortly after these photographs were taken. He died of a stab wound to the neck outside one of the local cafes in Borsal Heath. But I think what these photographs speak to, I think, is the importance of photography as a historian, as a source, because in the absence of somebody, in this case, this American person just rocking up to Borsal Heath, taking these photographs and then, you know, 50 years later sending them to me in the post, which was like the most incredible archival discovery, I remember vividly opening up These amazing photographs, and not just photographs, also interviews that she conducted as well with many of her subjects. You know, without her doing that, I never would have got access to the lives of these marginalised people and I wouldn't have been able to put them front and centre in the story of how Britain became multicultural.
- [39:21]
Podcast Host
What fresh light would you like your book to throw on people's view of multiculturalism in Britain? And I suppose for people who might continue to have concerns about it and.
- [39:32]
Kieran Connell
Its history, I really would hope that this book begins a new conversation about what it means to be multicultural. I really think that we've been stuck in this doom loop for a long, long time, almost like a race to the bottom, whereby I think, especially in the age of social media, that's worsened because we're now living through even more polarized and divisive times. And it's kind of, you know, the culture wars that we're sort of living through now has added a new layer of toxicity to the debate around multiculturalism, diversity, immigration. I would love if readers came away from reading my book with the idea that actually, yeah, like, I actually have a relationship to multicultural Britain. I'm part of that story of multicultural Britain. No matter what your ethnicity is and even whether or not you actually have immigration within your own family history, like, many of your listeners will have that in their family history, but others won't. But even if you don't, the chances are that your children, when they're at school, are going to be playing in a playground with the other kids who do have immigration in that family history. As they grow up, there's every chance they may enter into intimate relationships with people who do have immigration in their family history. They may even get married to them. And then your families may then suddenly have that story within it that it didn't have before. Even if it's not about children in the playground, it might be about the workplace that you work on. It might be about when you went to hospital and you were treated for that dodgy knee. Who was it that treated you? It might be about who you sat next to on the bus to work or who you're sitting next to right now on the train on the way home from work. And I think when you take that broader perspective, what you then arrive at, I think, is a slightly different version of Britishness. And I think that's what I really would like people to start to sort of reckon with. The other thing to say as well, as we look towards the future, ethnic diversity is not going to go anywhere if people wanted to, they couldn't get to a point where ethnic diversity is put back in its box. It's only going to become more and more commonplace. That's not even to do with immigration, that's just to do with changing demographic patterns. It's to do with people entering into new relationships. It's to do with diversity. Talked about white flight before, but also what's happening now is people from different backgrounds, South Asian backgrounds, Afro Caribbean backgrounds, moving out of the inner city areas into more middle class areas, into more suburban areas or into towns and villages. So this is going to be a story that's going to be with us for decades to come. And so I think it's time for a more inclusive and what I would argue is a more kind of grown up way of talking about it.
- [42:05]
Podcast Host
That was Kieran Connell speaking to me. Matt Elton Kieran Connell is reader of history at Queen's University Belfast and his book Multicultural A People's History is among the titles shortlisted for this year's Wolfson History Prize. For more details on the award, visit wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk.
- [42:35]
Kieran Connell
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Kieran Connell
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