The DVD slips into the loading tray, and I watch in hope rather than expectation. I’ve been told Tony Palmer’s The Wigan Casino is the greatest ever depiction of a northern soul all-nighter, and I want to see it for myself. The film is a window into the underground scene that emerged in the 1970s, powered by soul records that had flopped years earlier. But I’m not interested in the music or the dancing – it’s the crowd I’ve got an eye on.
I spot what I’m after. A young man, glistening under the spotlight as he spins balletically in a yellow vest. Then another person catches my eye with his perfectly picked-out afro. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, so I rewind to check, and yes, it’s true. A few minutes later, two girls clamber on to a coach, and one waves goodbye down the camera lens. Another boy squeezes through the crush at the front door. These young people are there for the same reason as everyone else: hard-to-find soul music that’s perfectly crafted for dancing. But all of them stand out. They’re different from the majority of the 1,200 dancers crammed into Wigan Casino. They’re Black and British.
Seeing those Black faces contradicted what I’d heard about the scene. Northern soul was about white working-class audiences falling in love with and coveting forgotten Black American music. My book We Were There started as a cultural expedition. I wanted to find something that wasn’t supposed to exist: Black northern soul fans from the 1970s and 80s. When I tracked them down, I found their stories changed the way I thought not just about northern soul but about Britain at the start of the Thatcher era. I wanted to know why. I began to wonder what other stories I might have been mistold or had never explored at all – and what those stories could reveal to me, and others, about Britain then and now.
No European country has been changed by Black culture more than the UK. British music, fashion, sport, literature, TV and film have had their DNA altered by the influence of millions of people who have come to this small island from across the African diaspora. Our sounds, food, languages, intellect and sartorial choices have meshed with what was already here to create modern British culture. Some of our biggest Hollywood stars – Daniel Kaluuya, Cynthia Erivo, David Oyelowo, Letitia Wright, John Boyega – are Black; designers such as Nicholas Daley and Grace Wales Bonner transmit our styles globally; artists such as Sonia Boyce and John Akomfrah represent Britain on the biggest stages; much of England’s men’s football team is of Black heritage. Black British culture is an inseparable part of British culture.
Modern Black Britishness, which has spread and morphed into myriad forms, was forged in the late 1970s and the 80s, a time of huge ruptures and tumult – social, economic and political. Everywhere you looked, a battle was taking place, and every single gain had to be fought for: from Birmingham, where academics such as Stuart Hall and Rastafarians were taking on racism in the media, to Leeds and Sheffield, where pioneering music producers would express a new Black British confidence, and even to the countryside, where the Black Environment Network would battle for their own place in the UK’s rural idyll.
This was a time of artistic and cultural creation unrivalled in the 20th century. A period when Black British culture flourished and contemporary British culture began to form. But our understanding of that influence is limited, and for many, it starts and ends in one place: London.
I was born in the middle of the Thatcher era: 1984. My memories are fuzzy, softened by time; half-remembered fragments. Images of the poll tax riots, milk breaks at primary school, Ian Wright’s gold tooth and Norman Lamont’s eyebrows. But when I think of my home town of Bradford, there are details that come into focus. I can still run through the surnames like a Rolodex in my head: the Taylors, the Sarrs, the Davids, the Ibegbunas, the Ekongs, the Fehintolas, the Cookes, the Oakleys and the Braithwaites. The families you knew and the families you knew of – either by reputation or connection. I can still plot a chart that links the Black families in my area of Bradford: the faces, the cars, the haircuts, the living room furniture and the intellects.
I left Bradford at the age of 18 and lived all over the UK – Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield, Bristol – in my early 20s before settling in London 14 years ago. In the capital, I’ve often been met by other Black people who express amazement at the fact Black life existed beyond the M25. Their responses weren’t hostile – there was an anthropological desire to understand this otherness. My time away didn’t make me reassess the Black culture I grew up with in Bradford, but it did make me question why it was so rarely acknowledged and little understood by everyone from the average person on the street to the institutions and centres of power in London.
If you want to understand the unrest that spread around the country in 1981, you’ll most likely be pointed towards events in Brixton. While the south London neighbourhood was a centre of Black culture and resistance, it wasn’t the only one – there were dozens around the UK, like in Liverpool, which had a different, older connection to the unrest. If you want to understand the far right and resistance to groups such as the National Front, you’ll find documentary-makers, journalists and writers referring to the battle of Lewisham in 1977 as a moment, the moment, when communities came together to fight back against the provocative marches. The Rock Against Racism concert in London’s Victoria Park one year later, where 100,000 people turned out to see the Clash, X-Ray Spex and Steel Pulse perform, is held up as the exemplar of when culture was used to counter rising fascism. If you want to understand the hostile relationship between the police and Black communities, you’ll find accounts of the unrest at Notting Hill carnival in 1976 as the totemic battle when Black Britain fought back.
All those events were crucial, but all feed into a simplistic narrative about Black Britishness, which suggests that a group of people, most of whom arrived in the UK after the second world war, took to the streets to rebel – with anger and with violence. This consensus view allows little room for nuance, and obscures a bigger, more complex tapestry of life in Britain during the Thatcher years. There are people in my book whose families go back five or six generations in the UK – long before the Empire Windrush arrived; there are artists and authors, legal campaigners, feminists, ravers, rude boys and rugby league superstars.
Some of the stories completely upend established cultural lore. Take the one about how house music came to the UK: the established narrative is that four intrepid Londoners – Danny Rampling, Johnny Walker, Nicky Holloway and Paul Oakenfold – went to Ibiza in 1987 and imported house music, providing the building blocks for the rave scene in the UK. But before acid house went mainstream, Manchester’s Black dancers were the first to interpret the sounds that Chicago DJs such as Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles were playing across the Atlantic. They did so in clubs like Moss Side’s The Reno, Black-owned establishments that operated from the margins while acting as incubators for the Black culture that in turn fed into mainstream British life.
As the tumult of Margaret Thatcher’s first term took hold, Black British people were confronted by a country that was becoming more hostile to their presence. Far-right groups marched through immigrant areas and made substantial gains at the ballot box. Mainstream politicians, including Thatcher, weaponised race in a way no other prominent politician had done before. But in 1981, thousands took to the streets, causing unrest that spread around the country, from Bristol to Bradford, as a whole generation rejected what little they were being offered in Britain. This was a time of conflict, not just in the Falklands but here, on the home front, in cities and towns up and down the country, wherever Black Britons were found.
In many – but by no means all – cases, the protagonists in these stories are the children of Windrush. Their parents – or in some cases, grandparents – came to Britain in that great wave of immigration that reshaped Britain in the postwar era. Their parents might have felt they were British because of their new citizenship, but once they got to the UK, they found they were “West Indian”, a catch-all term that no one from the Caribbean would use. Their children were in a different position – yes, they were born in Britain but the question that hung over them was: did that make them British?
Other Black Britons have a different origin story. Their parents weren’t from the Caribbean or Africa. Neither were their grandparents nor, in many cases, great-grandparents. In Liverpool and Cardiff, we find communities with roots dating back to before slavery was abolished across the British empire in the 1830s. These communities were the original multicultural Britain, and they often faced hostility that saw them segregated and attacked. Their stories are hiding in plain sight.
For many years, London was where the majority of Black British people lived – hardly surprising given its economic power and the opportunities it offered. Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove, Hackney, Peckham and Brent: all over the capital Black communities were growing and adjusting to life in Britain. But that is changing. The last census showed that, for the first time since ethnicity was included in 1991, the majority of Black British people live outside the capital.
As these communities develop, it’s becoming increasingly unlikely they’ll see themselves represented in popular culture. After the watershed moment of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020, a difficult and stilted conversation about race was forced in the UK. The creative industries tried – often cynically – to address longstanding absences in their collections or portfolios where Black British art should have been. Books, TV shows and films were commissioned and became part of a cultural wave that broke in the wake of BLM.
Series about frustrated creatives (Dreaming Whilst Black), opulent family sagas (Riches), Black kids in public schools (Boarders), sci-fi films set on dystopian housing estates (The Kitchen), award-winning gang tales (Top Boy), mould-breaking urban drama (Blue Story), unique accounts of trauma and creativity (I May Destroy You), Black women navigating love and life (Queenie) – there have been so many, yet every single one of those shows or films is set in London or is about Londoners. These aren’t Black British stories; they are part of an ever increasing Black London canon. For commissioners and editors, London is the Black story. But for me and thousands of others, it isn’t – and never could be. The Black London experience doesn’t map neatly on to every Black British experience. There are similarities and staples – food, language, music, hair products – but what makes the experiences different is history.
I’ve found that as soon as you widen the parameters of Black British culture beyond the capital, there’s an untapped reserve to draw from. There are stories that make us reassess moments in our recent history; by examining them, we can understand ourselves and our impact on culture and life in the country as a whole. That reassessment is necessary.
Just as I was finishing my book, new research was released showing that 50% of Britons couldn’t name one Black British historical figure. The UK, the authors said, knew “shockingly little” about its own Black history. We’ve had an important wave of corrective histories from David Olusoga, Jason Okundaye, Jim Pines, June Givanni, Ferdinand Dennis, Stella Dadzie, Paterson Joseph, Hakim Adi, Marika Sherwood and Stephen Bourne, but clearly we need more. Perhaps one way of addressing this lack of cut-through is to make these stories truly Black and British – rooting them in locations that have been overlooked, in areas that people don’t think of as Black. Maybe then more British people will pay attention to the history of this small but important island and think of Black history as having taken place in their own towns, cities or parishes, as well as in London.
Watching Palmer’s film about the Wigan Casino set me off on an expedition, one that took me to places I never thought I’d go. The journey sent me into dusty archives and on internet trawls searching for names scrawled down on yellowed paper. I spoke to people at the centre of extraordinary events who’ve never been asked about them. I managed to get hold of some interviewees a few months before they died and discovered that many others I wanted to speak to had already passed on. This history might have been staring us in the face, but it’s fragile.
There are so many more stories waiting to be unearthed, in cities like Nottingham and Belfast, and towns including Luton and Plymouth. Black history is everywhere on these islands. Without Black people in Wigan, Bradford, Ambleside and Wolverhampton, the country we live in and the culture it has produced would look completely different. What I’ve discovered made me reconsider what I thought Black Britain was and is, what it can encompass and where it might go next.
This is an edited extract from We Were There, which is published by Bodley Head on 17 April. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Lanre will be discussing the book at the following events; Waterstone’s Trafalgar Square, London (15 April); Bard Books, London (23 April); Ealing Literature Festival, London (24 April); Bradford City of Culture (26 April); Turner Contemporary, Margate (27 April); Portobello Books, Edinburgh (28 April); Waterstone’s Deansgate, Manchester (29 April); Tate Liverpool (30 April); Festival of Debate (1 May); Hay Festival w/Writers Mosaic, (30 May); Southbank Centre, London w/Writers Mosaic (11 July).
Beyond the capital: hidden stories from Black Britain
Wigan
By 1977, the all-night northern soul parties at the Wigan Casino had become legendary: 1,200 kids from across the country crammed into the former dancehall to listen to forgotten and discarded soul records. Among their number were dozens of Black northern soul fans who influenced the scene and navigated the late 70s in Britain, a time when the far right was on the rise.
Bradford
The wrongful arrest and conviction in 1978 of George Lindo, a textile worker from Bradford, triggered an international campaign for his release. At the same time, an American film crew came to the UK to record the reality of life in Britain for its Black residents. The film they made, Blacks Britannica – which captured some of the Lindo campaign – would be banned and censored but its warning proved prophetic.
Birmingham
As a moral panic about “Black muggers” and Rastafarians spread in 1979, an academic from Jamaica called Stuart Hall turned the lens around on the media, including the BBC, and accused British journalists of being complicit in the hugely negative coverage Black Britons received. His main inspiration would be the world outside his door in Birmingham, especially the multicultural area of Handsworth.
Liverpool
In 1981, violent unrest moved around the country, leaving many city centres looking like war zones after clashes between Black communities and the police. Unemployment, poverty and policing fuelled the disturbances in Liverpool, where documentary-maker Bea Freeman captured the thoughts of Black scousers who worked with her on landmark Channel 4 film They Haven’t Done Nothing.
Wolverhampton
In the city that was home to Enoch Powell, who became notorious after his “Rivers of Blood” speech, a new generation of Black British artists gathered. Their work reflected the chaotic and racist place Britain was in the early 1980s, but also questioned colonialism and the British empire. In October 1982, they invited other Black artists to a convention that became a launchpad for some of UK art’s biggest names.
Manchester
In Moss Side, behind a small black door, there was a club that acted as a hub connecting all parts of Black Manchester. The Reno welcomed guests including Muhammad Ali, and was linked to the Pan-African movement that had deep roots in the city. As Manchester was reshaped after the second world war, Manchester’s Black population was caught up in the churn and the club became a refuge and incubator for Black British culture.
The countryside
Away from the cities, Black Britons were trying to get a foothold as the 80s progressed. The Black Environment Network took on the complacency of politicians who refused to see rural racism as an issue, and included Ingrid Pollard whose artwork Pastoral Interlude tackled the reality for Black Britons who ventured into the green and pleasant land.
Cardiff
Cardiff’s Black population was one of the most significant in the country, known as the melting pot that had produced the pop star Shirley Bassey. But it had always been maligned, fetishised and – on occasions – attacked. In the late 80s, as an urban renewal plan sought to transform its Butetown area, a horrific murder saw a group of men framed and an entire community slandered.
Edinburgh
In January 1989, a Somali asylum seeker’s murder in the Scottish capital appalled the small Black community north of the border. The Lothian Black Forum, which included the former Guardian columnist Gary Younge, campaigned to force the Scottish public and politicians to see the reality of life for Black Scots who were constantly told racism was the “English disease”.
Leeds and Sheffield
As the 1980s drew to a close and Thatcher finally faced defeat, a new sound – created by working-class Black Britons – took hold of the rave scene. Bleep’n’bass emanated from places including Leeds and Sheffield. At the same time, a group of Black rugby league players, including Ellery Hanley and Martin Offiah, took the game to new heights and created the blueprint for modern sporting celebrities.
