Caribbean migrants not only came to work in the buses and hospitals. Many – such as the novelists George Lamming and Sam Selvon – came to Britain in search of opportunities to be paid to think and write. Others such as Stuart Hall, Vidia Naipaul and Walter Rodney came as students.

London also received a stream of de facto political refugees from the Caribbean and the United States, such C.L.R. James, the poet and publisher John LaRose, and Claudia Jones, the first theorist of 'intersectionality' and founder of the Notting Hill Carnival. Visual artists such as Horace Ove, Frank Bowling, and Donald Locke made painting, sculpture and film at the frontier of the avant-garde.

From London, they reassessed the past and imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the World. We are only now beginning to see as a whole this hidden current in Twentieth-century British intellectual life.

A lecture by Richard Drayton 26 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/windrush-thinkers

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

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