How I let food tell Britain’s Black history

My Nigerian dad came to Britain in 1951. He wasn’t the first, and he wasn’t the last. For two decades, roughly 1948 to 1971, people from Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad, Barbados, and across the British colonies answered an invitation from the British government.

The country, hollowed out by the Second World War, needed workers. So my dad and hundreds of thousands of others answered that call — and they brought everything with them. Their music. Their faith. Their stories. Their food.

The Windrush generation, as they became known — named after the HMT Empire Windrush, the ship that carried the first large group of Caribbean migrants to the UK in 1948 — built something here. Not just communities and neighborhoods, but an identity that became part of the UK’s fabric.

When people talk about multicultural Britain, they mean them. The Indians who settled in Bradford and Southall. The Jamaicans in Brixton. The Nigerians in Peckham. They came to a country that, in many cases, didn’t want them — “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” — and they built it anyway. That’s what June 22, Windrush Day, is about.

I grew up in Brixton, in a community that felt like its own world. We felt safe there. Every Friday and Saturday when I was a kid, there’d be a block party somewhere. Loud music, people out together, and always, always the smell of food on the street.There was nowhere else I could start London’s first African and Caribbean food tour. The food on the tour is delicious, first and foremost, but it’s also a history lesson. Every dish goes back centuries, rooted in the slave trade, in colonialism, in the ingenuity of people who had very little but refused to let that define them. When you eat that food in Brixton today, you’re tasting that legacy. Here are six dishes that give us a taste of Britain’s Black history.