Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain - Tapa dura

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Trevor Phillips is a leading name in the world of broadcast journalism and is best known as the presenter of LWT’s The London Programme. He currently writes a column for The Independent.

Mike Phillips is a journalist and academic and the award-winning author of several novels and screenplays.

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PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE MAJOR BBC TV SERIES 'WINDRUSH'

This is the epic and untold story of Britain’s black population and its impact on the politics, culture, identity and self image of British society.

‘We were full of expectation. Nobody knows exactly what you’re going to. Some of the people, when we arrive on British soil and people see chimneys and the houses, they thought they were factories. They said – oh boy, plenty of work at this place, seeing the chimneys, not knowing that was for warmth. And they were all jolly, joyful.’

Of all the epic tales still to be told of British life in the twentieth century the most gripping is the story that started fifty years ago with a thirty day journey across the Atlantic in an ageing merchant ship, the Empire Windrush. The voyagers were five hundred West Indians who were to become the catalyst of far reaching and significant changes in British society. For the first time, here were communities from outside the British Isles that could not blend into the background. British society faced an entirely new challenge.

'Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi Racial Britain' opens with the memories and impressions of the survivors of that first voyage, and continues through the witness of their descendants, friends, neighbours and colleagues and the testimonies of the politicians who made the key decisions alongside those who were, at the time, opposed to the presence of the black settlers. 'Windrush 'moves through the crucial events of British social history in the second half of the twentieth century: the great riots of the late fifties and early sixties, the hysteria of Powellism, the remodelling of England’s inner cities and the current passionate debates about the meaning of Englisheness. Concluding with a portrait of multi racial Britain in the present day, 'Windrush' is a celebration of the black British and of the new heritage Britain will carry forward into the twenty-first century.