On Sunday 16th October 2016, over 120 intrepid walkers joined the Migration Museum Project for our inaugural Migration Walk – an epic trek across London, from Cutty Sark in the east to Hyde Park in the west. The walk took approximately 9 hours, and covered 15 miles, and through the unpredictable weather, our expert guides illuminated hidden stories of migrants and refugees, following in the footsteps of those who have shaped the city throughout history.
Thank you to all who took part, and contributed towards our fundraising goal of £20,000, which which will support future activities, such as a new exhibition, and our long term goal of creating a new national Migration Museum. We’re incredibly close to reaching our goal, if you’d like to help us achieve this, please donate here.
If you took part in this walk, we would love your feedback on your experience, and how we may be able to improve the walk in the future. Please take a moment to fill out this short anonymous survey.
If you would like to take part in a guided section of the walk with a group of up to 15, we are able to organise a specifically tailored experience which would be perfect as a corporate team building activity, or to entertain clients. In order to facilitate this and to contribute towards our fundraising, we would request a donation of £1,000. Please contact Andrew@migrationmuseum.org for more information.
Please see the gallery below for some images from the walk.
Ike and Tina Turner, probably most famous for the song “River Deep, Mountain High”, but not really the main subject of this blog.
The title is a reference to the song made famous by Ike and Tina Turner in 1966, lavishly and operatically (some might say bombastically) produced by Phil Spector. Fortunately for this blog, Eric Burdon and the Animals (themselves not averse to musical pyrotechnics) reprised the song in 1968, the year that is the focus of this blog – or rather two weeks within that year.
First, the river
The ‘river’ bit comes with the 50th anniversary on 20 April of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. His speech can be heard in its entirety in Amol Rajan’s Radio 4 Archive on Four – ‘50 Years on: Rivers of Blood’. Because there is no full recording of the original speech – only those snippets that are regularly replayed to remind people of its content – the speech is delivered on the programme by Ian McDiarmid in an uncannily accurate resemblance to the man himself. Bizarrely, the ‘public’ parts of the speech – those that are regularly replayed – turn out not necessarily to be the most incendiary.
Much better people have written elsewhere about the speech itself and its repercussions. Though they were writing on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his speech, both Oliver Kamm (in his brilliant skewering of the man and his myth) and Sarfraz Manzoor (writing from a more personal perspective, but also trying to track down the people referred to in Powell’s speech) are essential reading. I’m happy to leave to those others – and to the many writing at the time of its 50th anniversary – the speech and its lingering toxicity.
Enoch Powell, a politician who didn’t always give the impression that he was happy with the way things were.
But there are two other aspects of the speech that struck me as I was listening to Amol Rajan’s programme and reflecting on the commemorations.
The first is that, although it is universally known now as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Powell never in fact uses this phrase in his speech. What he does say is: ‘like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”’ (incidentally, the ‘I seem to’, a phrasing he is fond of, seems to me an early example of humblebragging). An interesting linguistic inflation has taken place between ‘the River Tiber … much blood’ – where there is a single river, and the dominant constituent element continues to be water – and ‘rivers of blood’, where the plurality hints at a multiple, generalised tragedy, with blood the sole element.
Nobody seems to know when ‘River … blood’ became ‘rivers of blood’ and who was responsible for the coinage, but it becomes part of that family of phrases that are misrepresentations of the original (‘Play it again, Sam’ is another case in point, as are ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ and ‘A week is a long time in politics’) but which become the phrase that identifies the item in the public imagination. In their own way these are examples of fake news, only this time genuinely fake news, not the fake fake news routinely mocked by certain heads of state in an attempt to undermine verifiable facts and evidence.
The River Tiber – evidence of ‘much blood’ foaming about not immediately apparent.
Still the river, this time with swans in it
Our trustee Robert Winder (author of Bloody Foreigners and The Last Wolf) talked about the power of the media to create alternative truths in his inspiring Penny lecture on ‘Why do we fear migration?’ at Morley College, London, on Wednesday 18 April. He used as one example the story of ‘Swan bake’, a piece that had appeared in the Sun on 4 July 2003, with the subheading: ‘Asylum seekers steal the Queen’s birds for barbecues’. The story went on to describe east European poachers ‘luring the protected royal birds into baited traps’ and concluded that ‘the discovery last weekend confirmed fears that immigrants are regularly scoffing the Queen’s birds’.
Nick Medic, a Serbian journalist who had sought asylum in Britain following the collapse of former Yugoslavia, thought there was something fishy about this story and decided to investigate its key sources: a representative of the Swan Sanctuary and the Metropolitan Police. What he discovered was that nothing in the story reflected anything these sources had actually said; the closest link was the Swan Sanctuary’s rep’s second- or third-hand report that ‘a member of the public had phoned him some time previously and claimed that he could see someone pushing a swan in a shopping trolley’.
A shopping trolley containing a non-existent swan.
Following Nick’s submission to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), the Sun issued a ‘clarification’ in which the paper acknowledged that ‘nobody had been arrested in relation to these offences’. Though the PCC agreed that the Sun had presented as fact what was actually conjecture, the Commission felt the Sun’s clarification represented ‘sufficient remedial action’.
The original story had been published on the paper’s front page; the clarification was published on page 41.
But punchy headlines are gold dust to reporters, and the Sun wasn’t going to use ‘Swan bake’ just the once. So, some eight years later, the same headline was trotted out on 4 February 2011, with the bold first paragraph: ‘POACHERS have been accused of slaughtering 14 swans and cooking them on campfires at a popular beauty spot.’ This time the ‘fact’ that the alleged poachers may have been East European was held back until the sixth sentence.
And now the mountain
So much for ‘river deep’; what about ‘mountain high’? Well, Amol Rajan’s Radio 4 programme on Enoch Powell reminded me that Powell’s speech was delivered just two weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, on 4 April 1968, one of those not-precisely coincidences that, from this perspective, makes the fact that Powell chose to deliver the speech at all certainly stranger, if not actually more provocative.
In almost all respects, of course, these two men have nothing in common, but King and Powell were both considered, certainly by their supporters, to be the pre-eminent orators of their time – though their opponents were more likely to consider them dangerous firebrands, with the rabble-rousing abilities of all populist extremists. Both were capable of oratorical flights of fancy, often couched in biblical language. Both were held in high regard for the power of their intellect (Powell in particular, though Matthew Parris, on Amol Rajan’s programme, wonderfully dismisses him as ‘a stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person’) and for their commitment to the democratic principle. That fortnight in April ’68 also saw the end of both men’s careers – King’s literally and murderously, Powell’s by virtue of being banished to the political wilderness. That’s probably where the similarities end. In the 50 years following their death and disgrace, respectively, King’s star has continued to rise to Mandela-like proportions, and his moral righteousness and political courage are acknowledged now even by his opponents. By contrast, few people see Powell for the Old Testament prophet he was often presented as at the time, and his legacy lies almost entirely in the explicitly right-wing and racist/xenophobic parties that have formed in his wake and which hail him as an inspiration.
Martin Luther King (1929–68). What can you say? One of the greatest Americans who ever lived – one of the greatest people, full stop.
And whereas Powell talked about a river of blood, King – in his final speech on 3 April 1968 – talked about a mountaintop from which he had been able to see the Promised Land for his people. Rivers foaming with much blood on the one hand, a mountaintop of hope on the other; venom and bile dressed up as an intellectual exercise in democratic accountability in one corner, raw passion and tremulous belief in the other. You’re bound to know King’s speech already: but, even if you have heard it countless times, listen again to its final four minutes. The way in which he strings out the word ‘seen’ in his phrase ‘I have seen the promised land’ across several syllables and almost two seconds will still bring a shiver down your spine.
I’d love to be able to say that Eric Burdon’s version of the song is better than Ike and Tina Turner’s – he’s long been a hero – but it’s not. But then neither of them is as soulful or as heart-rending as Martin Luther King’s final speech.
For many people, there was a golden age when Britain was truly British, populated by the British, with shared cultural and religious values. This golden age is variously identified as that of King Arthur, or Elizabeth I or Victoria, or Churchill, among others. As is the case with most golden ages, all too often the evidence fails to support the myth. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the number of Germans in London was considerable (28,644out of a total population of 2.8 million, as recorded in the census of 1861, the first in which Londoners’ country of origin was sought) – but how diverse was the capital generally? This was a question explored by students at the University of Hertfordshire, and Adam Crymble, senior lecturer at that university, here discusses two illustrations taken from their findings.
Final year history students at the University of Hertfordshire went looking for images of London’s diversity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and had no trouble finding a veritable treasure trove. The images were brought together from already-digitised collections and shared via an Instagram feed that showcases not only Britain’s diversity but also some of the challenges and attitudes faced by migrant groups over the centuries.
The project asked students to consider what migration meant to the UK two hundred years ago. It proved a fabulous complement to the ‘What does migration mean in the UK today?’ poster project by our colleagues down the corridor, which is still on display at the Migration Museum.
It can be easy to forget about London’s long history with migration. The dominant narrative is that migration to the UK began in earnest in 1948, when the HMT Empire Windrush landed on British shores, discharging hundreds of Caribbean migrants and kicking off a wave of post-war immigration. But a quick trip into the digital archive of Scotch–London cartoonists George and Isaac Robert Cruickshank show that a diverse London stretches much deeper into the past.
‘Tom and Jerry “Masquerading it” among the Cadgers in the “Back Slums” in the Holy Land’ (1821), drawn and engraved by Isaac Robert Cruikshank and George Cruikshank (Public Domain, from the British Library collection).
During the course of their studies, students found two images from the Cruickshanks’ ‘Tom and Jerry’ series that are particularly illustrative of that fact. In 1821, the fictional English gentlemen Tom and Jerry, on their romp about town, delved into London’s most Irish space: the neighbourhood known as the Rookery of St Giles-in-the-Fields in the west end. Today it is but a stone’s throw from Tottenham Court Station and the site of Google’s London offices. Two hundred years ago, however, it was a tangle of streets and a slum that many people feared to enter. Sometimes it was referred to as the ‘Holy Land’ – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the high concentration of Irish Catholics in the region and the ironically unholy behaviour to be found therein. It was described as a ‘rabbit warren’ of narrow passages and dangerously overcrowded houses where tenants rented a shared bed or a space on the bare floorboards for as little as 1p a night.
It was among these ‘cadgers’ that Tom and Jerry spent their evening in St Giles, in one of the area’s infamous subterranean public houses. The pair witnessed the locals in their evening revelry after a hard day of begging and stealing, followed by a night of hard drinking, singing, and fighting away their daily take. The poor people of St Giles lived for the moment. With no way to safely store valuables, they knew that a day that ended penniless was a night safe from robbery.
Tom and Jerry undoubtedly heard a few Irish brogues as they worked the room that fictional night two centuries ago. But the Cruikshanks’ depiction of the scene reminds us of something else: this was a diverse and cosmopolitan space. Most of that diversity is invisible to us, but there are at least three black individuals in the painting who act as a clear reminder that London was home to many different migrant groups. Two of those black people are dressed as sailors, highlighting the important role played by international trade in bringing people to London from around the world. The arrival of those particular individuals was of course linked at least tangentially to the British trade in Africans, which had ceased only in 1807, when the slave trade was finally abolished in the British Empire. But dark-skinned faces from other parts of the world could also be found on London’s streets – ‘Lascar’ sailors from India, and East Asians arriving on the ships from China were part of daily life in London.
What’s particularly noticeable about the black individuals in the image is that they are simply part of the evening festivities. One of them is joining a fistfight in the back left, another plays the fiddle at centre, and the third is smoking a pipe around a table of fast friends at right. Apart from the fistfight, which seems to include a fairly large group of people, there’s no sign these black people are unwelcome in this space, nor should they be in such a multicultural part of town.
Diversity did not stop there. Facing the viewer in the bottom-left foreground is a man exhibiting physical characteristics used to denote Jewishness in nineteenth-century caricature. His presence is a reminder that the capital was also home to two Jewish populations: Ashkenazi and Sephardic. He reminds us that London was not an exclusively Christian city in the early nineteenth century. Nor was it solely Church of England. In addition to the large group of Irish Catholics in the Rookery, the tiny parish of St Giles was home to a Sardinian Catholic Chapel, attached to the Sardinian Embassy, and a place for the city’s Italian population to come together and worship.
Within minutes from where Tom and Jerry stood and just a few feet to the west of the parish boundary was the most French part of London – St Anne Soho, which was home to both French Catholics who had fled the French Revolution in the 1790s, and the descendants of the French Protestant Huguenots who had fled persecution almost exactly a century earlier, in 1685. One must wonder if any French voices echoed out among those cadgers in the room. If they had done, it certainly would not have been unusual.
It’s a shame the figures in the painting cannot speak, for if they could, their voices would ring forth a chorus of accents from up and down the country, from Glasgow to Cornwall and everywhere in-between. London was a melting pot of English migrants who joined these strangers from further afield and came together on unfamiliar streets, where they built new relationships. Many of the British internal migrants passed through St Giles and its Rookery, adding their accents to the fray.
‘Lowest Life in London. Tom, Jerry and Logic among the unsophisticated Sons and Daughters of Nature at “All Max” in the East’ (1821), drawn and engraved by Isaac Robert Cruikshank and George Cruikshank (Public Domain, from the British Library collection).
Diversity was of course not limited to St Giles. A few months earlier, Tom and Jerry had spent an evening in the city’s East End, at a popular working class dance hall. The scene is labelled ‘Lowest Life in London’, which acknowledges class and racial prejudices of the day, but also challenges those fears by depicting a joyful scene that showcases the coming together of cultures and a blending of classes. The wealthy Jerry cavorts with a well-travelled peg-legged sailor who plays a tune on his fiddle. A black woman in a colourful dress jigs with an Irishman, while a white person minds her on-looking baby.
These imaginary images showcased some of London’s most diverse spaces in the early nineteenth century. In subterranean public houses, and dancing clubs on the edge of town, diversity was on the fringes. But, importantly, it was present. Faces of every shade, and accents of every pitch and timbre, rang through London. Windows into that lost world presented through the escapades of Tom and Jerry remind us of just how deeply embedded migration is in London’s history. It seems unlikely that London has ever been a white, Protestant, English city.
Adam Crymble is a senior lecturer and historian of migration at the University of Hertfordshire. He is himself a migrant to London. The images discussed in this article were collected by his final year history students who contributed images of migration and diversity to an Instagram feed celebrating Britain’s diverse past. With special thanks to Ellen Daly for contributing the image of Tom and Jerry dancing at the ‘All Max’.
On Tuesday 13 March, Historic England conferred Grade I listed status on the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, Surrey, which thereby became the first mosque to receive this status in the country.
There had been other registered mosques in the UK before the Woking mosque, the earliest on record being the Liverpool Muslim Institute, which was established in 1887 in a street called Mount Vernon Terrace, and moved to Brougham Terrace in 1889. Brougham Terrace is considered to be the first fully functioning community mosque, but the Shah Jahan Mosque, which was established in the same year (1889), was the first purpose-built mosque in this country, indeed in northern Europe.
There are no end of fascinating things about the Shah Jahan Mosque, which owes its name to its principal funder, the female ruler of the Indian princely state of Bhopal, the Sultan Shah Jahan Begum. One is the obvious surprise of its location in Woking, a commuter town in Surrey, 30-odd miles from London, and not the obvious focal point for Islamic worship or study. Another is that, when the mosque was established (in 1889), there were very few Muslims among its worshippers who had been born outside the country: most were white British men and women who had converted to Islam, among them (as listed on the mosque’s website) Lord Headley, Marmaduke Pickthall, David Cowen, Charles Buchanan Hamilton (nephew of James Hamilton, the President of the United States of America), Sir Archibald Hamilton (cousin to King George) and the Shaykh of the British Isles, Abdullah Quilliam, who had been born William Henry Quilliam.
A third interesting aspect of the Shah Jahan is that it was designed by an English architect, William Isaac Chambers, who had moved to Dublin in the 1870s (building an elaborate villa for himself there) but who had then returned to England in the mid-1880s to set up an architectural practice in Woking.
And a fourth fascinating aspect of the mosque is that the person principally responsible for its establishment was a British-Hungarian Jew, Gottlieb Leitner. Leitner acquired the site of the mosque (previously the site of the Royal Dramatic College) with the intention of building a mosque, a synagogue, a temple and a church in the same area. His early death, at the age of 59, left these plans unfulfilled, and his heirs sold off the land earmarked for the synagogue and the temple; the church was the only other building built – it still stands today as St. Paul’s Church, on (fittingly) Oriental Road.
Leitner was an extraordinary man, prodigiously gifted in languages: he was said to have been fluent in at least nine languages by the age of 10 and, later, to have extended this fluency to 10 more languages, while also being able to get around in a further 30. He spent more than 20 years in India, mostly in the Punjab, where he helped to found the University of the Punjab, and where he co-wrote a two-volume History of Islam in Urdu. He returned to Britain in 1881, with the firm intention of establishing a centre for the study of Oriental languages, the first of its kind in Europe. When he died, in 1899, he was acknowledged as the world’s pre-eminent orientalist (a description that nowadays would be qualified with the phrase ‘in the West’), yet, despite being born a Jew and having devoted much of his life to the study of Islam, his burial was undertaken in St Paul’s Church.
Having depended so intensively on Leitner’s passion and involvement, the Oriental Institute fell into disuse after his death, and the mosque is now the only surviving memory of this remarkable man’s ambition. It is great news that the architectural and symbolic importance of this ‘extraordinarily dignified little building’ (as Nikolaus Pevsner put it) has finally, just under 130 years after its establishment, been recognised in its Grade I listing.
Shahed Saleem, a long-time friend and supporter of the Migration Museum Project, has been instrumental in the listing of the Shah Jahan Mosque. His recently published book, The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History (published by Historic England) includes these accounts of the mosque:
With Chambers’ [the architect’s] penchant for architectural flamboyance, his mosque liberally embraces Mughal architecture, the style developed by the rulers of much of South Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Earlier Mughal buildings in and around Delhi display a certain classical rigour and formality. This evolved in later Mughal buildings further south around the Deccan region of India into a more expressive architectural language. While the main elements of a central large dome, large central arched portico and smaller flanking bays with arched doorways or niches remain throughout the Mughal period, in the later buildings these become noticeably more sculptural. Chambers had taken and adapted this architectural language at Woking, with a dome that is an evolution of the well-recognised onion shape into a much more spherical object.
The Shah Jahan Mosque also seems to take the language of late Mughal architecture in a Gothic direction in the portico’s ogee archway and the trefoil-shaped arch over the main entrance door. The smaller domed cupola corner turret is a feature that occurs throughout the Mughal period. The stepped battlements, however, follow a style that originate in early Fatimid architecture found in Egypt in the 10th century. These seem to be the only real instances where the architect has cross-referenced architectural languages in an otherwise faithful use of Mughal stylistic heritage.
The Shah Jahan Mosque almost perfectly captures the spirit of 19th-century ‘Orientalism’. This was a time when, for curious Europeans, there was a mysterious and fantastical place called ‘the East’. It was a place of strange customs, flamboyant dress and exotic women, encapsulated in a vast genre of Orientalist paintings depicting the East in theatrical ways. The Woking Mosque could be considered as the architectural equivalent of this Orientalist fantasy.
[. . . ]
The Woking Mosque has the longest and one of the most significant histories of any mosque in Britain. Architecturally, it represents the very first manifestation of the mosque as a building type, and thus the representation of Islam, in Britain and indeed in Western Europe. The mosque enabled a Muslim social organisation to develop, which played a fundamental role in the evolution of British Muslim institutions and in the establishment of Islam in Britain.
The great social changes that followed World War II, and the seismic demographic shifts in the Muslim populations of Britain, did not pass this secluded mosque by. As social change came to Woking, the role of the mosque shifted from national beacon to place of local community need, and its administration and outlook came to reflect this new reality.
Restored and listed, the Woking Mosque is a secure part of the nation’s heritage. As Muslim communities and cultures become generationally embedded in Britain, and as their histories are explored and made manifest, the Woking Mosque will always be revisited as a key starting point of Muslim architectural and institutional history in Britain.
from Saleem, S (2018) The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History.
London: Historic England.
The Migration Museum Project would like to thank Shahed Saleem for permission to quote from his book and Historic England for allowing us to use photographs from their collection.
