The historic studio of the internationally renowned London-based Ghanaian photographer James Barnor has been all but forgotten HE’S BEEN EXHIBITED in the world’s top galleries, received his country’s highest honour and most recently was the subject of a feature in the New York Times, but when I took a trip to the place Ghanaian photographer …
AFTER TURNING heads with his first solo show at the age of 22, Moses Quiquine’s artistic career is progressing by leaps and bounds, making history in 2019 as the youngest and first black person to be given a residency at the V&A and counting the legendary musician Jazzy B among his fans. The former Holloway …
CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER, commentator, author, eminence grise … Professor Gus John can be described as many things but whatever you do, don’t call him member of the Windrush generation. Hot off the press, his latest book is a broadside against what he calls the “Windrushsisation” of the UK’s black community, saying it is a falsification …
THE STORY OF early West Indian migrants who settled in a small corner of north London has been brought to life in a novel that was nominated for a major literary award last month. In The Susu Keeper, Joy Fraser takes a walk down memory lane to Queen’s Crescent, Camden, in the 1960s and …
Last year Sonia Boyce won the Venice Biennale’s top prize, the first black woman to represent the UK and the first Brit to win it in more than a quarter of a century. Next month, her winning installation, Feeling Her Way, is coming to the Turner for its UK debut, giving people a chance to …
Standing elegantly in his black pin striped suit and trilby hat, John Richardson looks the very epitome of cool despite having spent a month sailing the 3,000 miles from Jamaica to England on the Empire WIndrush in 1948. The beautifully arranged photograph of him beside fellow passengers John Hazel and Harold Wilmot has become an …
He was a prolific composer of ballet and orchestral scores evoking the rhythms of his Sephardic roots but best known for a 10 second trumpet fanfare that once announced BBC broadcasts for the Open University. Yet Leonard Salzedo remains the forgotten man of English 20th century classical music, seldom performed and little recorded, with an …
BOLD, MISCHIEVOUS and dreamy, Althea’s McNish’s personality was imprinted on her work, which trail blazed its way through the world of furnishings and couture during an extraordinary 60-year career. Despite being acknowledged within the industry as one of the UK’s most innovative designers whose work collapsed the boundaries between fine art and manufactured textiles, …
Looking back at the launch of the Camden New Journal in north London as one of the UK’s few independently owned newspapers 40 years ago WHEN ERIC Gordon proudly opened the the first ever issue of the Camden New Journal on March 25 1982 there were coos of delight from staff as we surveyed the …
They have been dubbed the “dance detectives”, searching out fragments of lost ballet masterpieces to fit them together again for the modern stage. Starting out with Vaslav Nijinsky’s legendary Rite of Spring more than three decades ago when all they had to begin with was a score and three fading photographs, Millicent Hodson and Kenneth …
In between the wars he was the talk of the town and was remembered by fellow actor James Mason as a bit of a character. But nowadays few people have heard of Ernest Trimmingham, one of the first black actors in British film and a regular fixture on the London stage. Trimmingham and Mason lodged …
Aged 89 and three quarters, Harry Landis is a real character, full of anecdotes from an acting career that stretches back more than 60 years. He’s been in almost everything you can think of, from TV dramas to Hollywood blockbusters, not to mention heavyweight roles in some of the most important stage plays of the …
I‘m sitting in the London front room of saxophonist Teddy Osei as he guides me through his glory days with Osibisa, the band he founded some 50 years ago to take Britain and the rest of the world by storm. In place of the usual family photographs, his walls and shelves are adorned with …
He was once described as the man who put the beat into the Beatles but when the musician, Harold ‘Lord Woodbine’ Phillips, was invited to see a play about the Fab Four at the the Liverpool Playhouse in 1992 he saw that he had been airbrushed out of a backdrop photo with the band in …
It is a familiar tale of inner-city gentrification – area is earmarked for redevelopment, ordinary folk are sidelined, demolition follows. Not King’s Cross or Elephant and Castle but Dashalar, a centuries-old neighbourhood in the centre of Beijing where alley-way gift stores vie for attention with the likes of Zara, Louis Vuitton and H&M in one …
Long before the arrival of modern-day shape shifters like Photoshop and Facebook, Jo Spence was challenging the way photography can falsify reality by creating perfect lives in a society that actively damages them. Her primary evidence came from her family album that charted her 1930s beginnings through to her formative years and adulthood but failed …
The voice at the other end of the line belonged to a woman who’d just turned 90 and I was surprised at its firm tone giving me brisk instructions of where and when to meet. But I should have known better. It was Jocelyn Barrow who’d made a career out of snapping at the heels …
As a major historical figure pored over by academics and the subject of several books, one would have thought that there was little more to be learnt about Olaudah Equiano, the former slave whose best-selling autobiography became a major weapon in the abolitionist cause towards the end of the 18th century. While there is a …
From the deserts of Arizona to a crumbling Victorian school building in Bloomsbury, that’s the incredible back story of a gallery usually mentioned in the same sentence as pioneering and innovative. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, the October Gallery has been revisiting those it has championed over the years, a long and impressive list that …
For social historian John Boughton the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy remains a chilling symbol of the way in which public housing and those who live in it have been nonchalantly cast aside over the last four decades, subject to ruthless cost-cutting, sell-offs and all-round scorn. Yet as he underlines in his book Municipal Dreams, council …
He was chucked out of sixth form, scraped through ‘A’ level art and has never been to art school but now former Camden schoolboy Moses Quiquine is being hailed as ‘one to watch’ with a debut exhibition that has wowed the critics. A display of meticulously worked textiles that blur the line between fashion and …
When Russian-born architect Berthold Lubetkin famously said, “Nothing is too good for ordinary people”, he really meant it. His Spa Green Estate in Finsbury emerged out of the wreckage of World War ll as an example of public housing at its best in which quality materials and well-proportioned rooms, designed to capture maximum sunlight, were …
Back in the day there was a book that every woman I knew had a copy of and if they didn’t they would borrow mine. That is why it eventually had to be held together by sticky tape. Documenting for the first time the lives of black women in Britain as told by those who …
As a conservationist steeped in the history of the inner city moving into the oldest house in Bloomsbury was like winning the jackpot for Alec Forshaw. Built in 1686, 49 Great Ormond St had gone from elegant family residence to down-at-heel lodgings, as well as offices, a coffee shop and museum before he bought it …
As Britain commemorates the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury 70 years ago, the lives of many of those who lived through the era it has come to define are being looked at again with fresh eyes. One of them is Billy Strachan, a former RAF flight lieutenant from Jamaica whose civilian life was …
A film is all that is left of legendary north London club Based in an old Victorian theatre on Dalston Lane, it pioneered black music in the UK for more than 30 years before finally morphing into a main staging post for London’s rave scene. But in 2007 the Four Aces became victim of the …
It was Claudia Jones’ appearance on a UK postage stamp in 2008 that signalled her transition from virtual oblivion to her elevation into the political mainstream as part of the Royal Mail’s ‘women of distinction’ issue. It didn’t happen by accident. For years there had been a quiet but determined campaign to ensure that she …
They stare out of the frame with the stillness and solemnity characteristic of Victorian studio photography, except that these boys and girls are black and their remarkable images were taken after being admitted to the first Barnardo’s homes more than 100 years ago. Who they are and how they came to be in the care …
Rolling down the decades with London-based musician Lord Eric It was July 1969 and aspiring musician Eric Carboo found himself at the heart of an event that became part of rock history. It was the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park attended by an estimated crowd of half a million. But Eric hadn’t gone …
Two weeks after Anna Minton’s latest book was published in June the Grenfell Tower went up in flames, illuminating in stark relief her damning analysis of London’s housing crisis. “It is really shocking that such a catastrophe should happen in one of the richest parts of London, in one of the richest parts of the …
A FREE AND generous spirit would have been one of the best ways to describe long-time Primrose Hill resident Elizabeth van der Drift who has died aged 94. In her thirties she travelled alone to Nigeria for a holiday despite being advised not to because of the political situation, and later to Zambia long before … Continue reading
A SHORT STORY in the Camden New Journal in January 1983 announced the launch of an “exciting new community venture for King’s Cross”. It was to be called the Calthorpe Project, the result, it said, of “people power” mobilising to prevent a derelict piece of land in Gray’s Inn Road being sold off to office … Continue reading
THERE WAS standing room only at the showbiz-style send-off for the music manager Bobby Hanlon, whose childhood adoration of Kylie Minogue saw him become a mover and shaker in the pop world. Mourners wore bright colours and a diamante pink casket lay within a horse-drawn glass carriage in honour of the larger than life figure … Continue reading
A FAINT WINTER’S sun followed us as we trudged up King’s Cross Road to reach an attractive block of redbrick flats in Clerkenwell whose name, Spring House, said it all. In the middle of the forecourt, a few metres down, lay the purpose of our visit, Black Mary’s Hole, a 17th century well popular among … Continue reading
TWO COMMUNITIES in Nigeria’s Niger Delta are one step closer to taking oil giant Shell to court after a landmark decision by the London High Court. The ruling, which was made at the end of last year, follows an eight-year legal battle in which Shell PLC argued that compensation claims for environmental damage could not … Continue reading
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