[Causeway Green Hostel, Birmingham 1949]

[Submitted by Kevin Searle]

One important reason as to why the black community in London, developed around Brixton, is because many of the arrivants who migrated aboard the Empire Windrush were initially accommodated by the Ministry of Labour, in an air-raid shelter underneath Clapham Common Tube station. The underground station can be found on Acre Lane, and if one continues to travels down Acre Lane, one soon arrives on Brixton High Road.

In his study, A Land of Dreams, A Study of Jewish and Afro-Caribbean Migrant Communities in England, Simon Taylor writes that the early members of the Afro-Caribbean community in Birmingham were similarly accommodated in overcrowded hostels as well. These migrants were put up in local hostels such as the Free Shelter at Winson Green, the Causeway Green Hostel, the Salvation Army Hostel and Rowton House. Taylor writes that the largest hostel in the city refused to take black residents, and another imposed a maximum quota of six.

In an article from 1949 in Birmingham, we have further evidence of some of the earliest Jamaican migrants being housed by the Ministry of Labour, with European Volunteer Workers from Poland, in a hostel in Causeway Green, near Oldbury. However, perhaps one reason that the black community in Birmingham did not develop around Oldbury, in a similar pattern to the way in which the black community developed around Brixton in London, is because of the events which would transpire there. This Faces and Places provides an introduction to a disturbance which was to result in the Afro-Caribbean arrivants being moved on from the Hostel.