Multicultural Britain: A People's History

"This is very timely because Kieran Connell looks at four communities in Britain, not London, because London is just different. He produces what he calls a bottom-up account of those four communities and how they dealt with racial change through immigration. It’s timely because the narrative of white victimhood is something he looks at a lot, the idea that somehow, when an immigrant community is attacked, it’s because white people aren’t getting what they deserve. He really challenges that brilliantly. It’s a different sort of book, because a lot is based on his own experience. He focuses on four communities: Cardiff, Nottingham, Balsall Heath, and Bradford. He himself grew up in Balsall Heath, in a multicultural community. He’s asking questions about what multiculturalism really is, and he focuses on particular themes for those four communities, many of them around sex and marriage, particularly interracial marriage, which was one of the big flare points for violence. But he also looks at things like education. That’s what he focuses on in Bradford. These are very topical subjects, and he has this great source base in memoirs and his own memory, but also a photographic archive from Balsall Heath, which shows ordinary people just sitting around on the street. It’s a very clever use of the photographic archive, I think. He makes you think about immigration differently. When he tells the story of Bradford in the 1970s, he looks at the way that schools were populated. Some pupils were bussed to different schools in order not to ‘overrun’ one school with black children. He thinks about what that means, because on one level, it means that they won’t be able to join in after-school activities, because they’ll all have been bussed home again. They’re not going to be able to integrate because they’re no longer on the school premises. But he also thinks about how seeing buses full of black kids travelling across the town played into the narrative that the town was being overrun by black people, because people in predominantly white areas will see these buses going through and start to get panicky. It’s the unintended consequences of an attempt to integrate communities that may actually divide those communities. I thought that was a very interesting way of looking at it, and I like the fact that it’s very personal. He talks about going to see his gran when he was a child, going out on day trips and then returning to these communities, staying there, and he talks about what happened to him when he was doing the research. So it’s got a lot of personal, anecdotal material, which is woven really well into the bigger sociological questions about immigration. One of his themes is that British racism persists, but it shifts in terms of whether it’s individual racism or whether it’s structural racism. He’s not optimistic about the policies that have been used, but he is optimistic about individual people and their communities and communities working together, friendships across racial boundaries, and just generally letting it happen rather than trying to manage it. So I think, overall, there is optimism there. But exposing the particular stories of these four communities does illuminate a lot of the big questions. The winner of the 2025 Wolfson History Prize will be announced on December 2nd ."