An eastern European woman passes UKIP posters on West Street in Boston, Lincolnshire. Renamed by locals as ‘East Street’, this busy shopping area caters to the large eastern European communities in the town, most of whom work in the agriculture, horticulture or service sectors, including those catering to their own communities’ needs.
As Britain’s cities, towns and countryside become more ethnically diverse, it is important that issues of diversity and multiculture are taught in relevant and sensitive ways. In this blog, Katy Bennett and Giles Mohan reflect on their teaching workshop at the Migration Museum Project’s Call Me By My Name exhibition last year and on the research that underpinned it. We will be publishing two further blogs about their workshops with school groups over the next week.
As Britain’s towns and cities become increasingly diverse, teaching about multicultural becomes more and more important. ‘Minority’ groups are found no longer only in large (post-) industrial cities like Manchester or Birmingham but also in smaller urban centres like Boston and Peterborough. The maps show census data which reflects these changes, with the green and blue shadings indicating more diverse areas. The changes from the 1991 map to the 2011 map reveal more areas becoming diverse, and already diverse areas – such as parts of London – becoming even more diverse.
Source: Gemma Catney (2016) ‘The Changing Geographies of Ethnic Diversity in England and Wales, 1991–2011’, Population, Space and Place, Volume 22, Issue 8, 750–65.
The geographies of multiculture have changed and are continually changing, so that all areas, and the schools they contain, need to think about how people engage with cultural diversity and difference. As part of the Migration Museum Project’s Call Me By My Name exhibition in 2016, we ran a teaching workshop to help students think about their own identity and how they identify and relate to others in their daily lives. Our workshop took place in the space of the exhibition, surrounded by photographs, artwork and artefacts that brought into the room personal experiences of migration, refugee camps, loss of home and loved ones and experiences of moving to the UK. Haunting the space were the fake ‘life’ jackets used by migrants and found on beaches, exhibits counting relatives lost in perilous sea crossings and the vulnerability of lives lived in camps, at borders and on the margins of societies.
We began the workshop with Year 8 students by asking them to walk around the room. When we clapped, they had to form into self-selecting groups of four or five (i.e with no intervention from ourselves) and we asked them to draw around both their hands on A4 sheets of plain paper. They then wrote on their left-hand outline words that describe how they see themselves and on their right-hand outline words that they think other people would use to describe them. Next, they were asked to talk in their groups about the words they had used to describe each hand, and how they felt about the words others might use to describe them. After a few minutes of these group discussions, in the course of which we mingled and chatted, a few students stood up to talk about their hand drawings and labelling.
The aim was to open up questions of cultural identity and to think how inadequate words and categories are for capturing complex and shifting identities. One person, for example, labelled themselves as Somalian, from Milton Keynes, and moving from Sweden – and even then they were aware that these labels didn’t really capture who they were but were ways they used to help others position them. When it came to how others might label them, however, they replied ‘African’ or ‘black’. In most cases, there were differences between how people identified themselves and how they thought others would identify them.
We asked the students why they sat with whom they did, because we were also interested in the ways in which groups form. One group of young men were largely of Ghanaian origin and were vocal and confident; other groups were a bit more mixed ethnically and nationally, with only one or two putting themselves forward as spokespeople.
The dynamics of the room were used as a way of thinking about the small-scale geographies of multiculture. While the school body was very mixed ethnically, like many classrooms across the UK, groups sometimes followed particular ethnic and national lines. Most students were used to using ethnic and racial labels like ‘white’ or ‘African’, but were equally aware that these were quite blunt categories which concealed lots of complexity and contradictions.
It is these same everyday ‘micro’-geographies that we explored in a research project called Living Multiculture: the new geographies of ethnic diversity and the changing formations of multiculture in England, which we conducted as part of a team led by Professor Sarah Neal.
Mural in Hackney, east London. ©Author’s own
The Living Multiculture project started from the reality of the changing geography of ethnic diversity in contemporary Britain – the patterns shown in the maps above. Places are changing, and we wanted to understand how people understand and live through these changes. We also wanted to examine ‘everyday’ encounters across ethnic difference against the background of the popular image, in the media and among many politicians, that multiculturalism in Britain had ‘failed’ – particularly post-BREXIT – and that cities are riven with segregated neighbourhoods and ethnic and racial tension. It was not that we wanted to turn a blind eye to very real conflicts, but to argue that, for many people, most of the time they rub along. Our main question was ‘How do people live and experience multiculture as part of their everyday lives?’
We studied this question through fieldwork in three areas, each of which represented a different aspect of Britain’s changing ethnic geography.
You can find out more on our website and in a new book we have co-authored with the rest of the team, but some of the key findings are:
Drawing around your hands might seem playful, but it opens up a whole series of questions about the micro-geographies of multiculture.
Dr Katy Bennett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Leicester, where she works on questions of social and cultural geography, especially identity, emotion, home, community and multiculture. Professor Giles Mohan is at the Open University and works on international development and migration. Together they were part of a team headed by Professor Sarah Neal called Living Multiculture. Out of this project the team has just published a new book called Lived Experiences of Multiculture: The New Social and Spatial Relations of Diversity, details of which can be found here.
The last day of our previous exhibition, Call Me By My Name: Stories from Calais and beyond, was Sunday 20 August; the dismantling and de-installing of the exhibition started the next day and was completed in a matter of days. Exactly one calendar month later our new exhibition, No Turning Back: Seven migration moments that changed Britain, opened, on Wednesday 20 September in our space at The Workshop, 26 Lambeth High Street.
The Migration Museum at The Workshop, two days after ‘Call Me By My Name’ closed to the public.
In the four weeks between the two exhibitions, the rooms in our first-floor premises were completely reconfigured, the walls made good and repainted, new structures put on the window areas, new lighting installed, the floor repaired where necessary . . . oh, and the new exhibition installed, bringing together the work of twenty-odd artists, much of it commissioned specifically for this display (thanks to our generous sponsors).
Koto Akyoshi and Ariadna Martinez (volunteers, both) working on the exhibition’s distinctive mustard paint.
Leaving to one side for the moment the fact that this exhibition was conceived, researched, commissioned and delivered within a mere nine months (an in-human gestation period), you have to wonder, ‘How was this possible?’
Andrew Steeds (MMP project manager) works on the new plinth for Roman Lokati’s sculpture, while Martin Cottis (joiner supremo) works in the background.
It’s a long roll-call, and it would be a mistake to get all Oscar-ceremony about it, but the most significant contribution outside our immediate team came from our volunteers. No doubt all charitable organisations depend on the goodwill of their volunteers, but the generosity of those who routinely turn up to staff our exhibitions, facilitate events and help us in the day-to-day running of our project is staggering. In addition, for No Turning Back, a large number of volunteers researched the seven historical moments that form the backbone of the exhibition, clarifying historical data, sourcing photographic and other records of the time, tracking down quotations to frame the display. And then many of them turned up to paint the museum and get the physical structure ready for the exhibition itself. This time the expression is absolutely true: we couldn’t have done it without them.
The two members of our team who were centrally responsible for putting the exhibition together (and whose current recuperation is therefore richly deserved) are Sue McAlpine and Aditi Anand. But Sue and Aditi would be the first to say that their work would have been impossible had it not been for the input not only of the volunteers just mentioned but also, crucially, that of our trustee Robert Winder and education committee member Martin Spafford, both of whom were instrumental in shaping the historical structure of No Turning Back.
Andy Dark at work on the Rock Against Racism section of the exhibition.
However back-breaking it may be, this ability to assemble an exhibition in a period of time that most more-established institutions would find difficult has the huge advantage of allowing us to respond to current preoccupations while they are still viscerally significant. We were able to do that last year with Call Me By My Name, and all the signs are that we have done so again this year with No Turning Back. Conceived in the wake of the EU referendum debate, and the apparent schism in the country that it engendered, the current exhibition allows us to question whether this is a unique moment or whether in fact there have been previous pivotal points in our history that were equally significant to our attitude to influxes of people or to our engagement with the wider world.
Each moment, we hope, will be controversial, raise questions and provoke the occasional ‘I didn’t know that!’ moment. The historical starting point is the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, the only moment in British history – so far – when a complete race or religion was forcibly banished from the country. The other bookend is the 2011 Census, which revealed a dramatic growth in people self-identifying as mixed-race or mixed-heritage. In-between, there are five other moments (come and see for yourselves!) all of which have resonances for our current position. What happened? How did it happen? What was the human fall-out? What if something similar happened now . . . ? – these are some of the questions we hope will be raised by the display.
Emily Miller (MMP education officer) and Faiza Mahmood (MMP events co-ordinator) assembling Angelicá Dass‘s ‘Humanæ’ display; portraits Angelicá took of Lambeth and Southwark residents will be added to the display in October.
But this is not a dry academic account of seven moments in our history. The whole display is peopled by quotations, past and present, illustrating each theme, and on the floors and walls artists give their response to the events featured. The whole impression is history re-processed through a contemporary sensibility.
We hope the exhibition will get people thinking, discussing and arguing; and we plan to run a raft of events and activities that take the conversations forward. We have selected seven moments that seemed to us significant, but there is no suggestion, of course, that these are the only seven moments that could have been selected. Let us know the moments that you think we should have chosen. Eventually, we hope, all of them will be given due prominence in the permanent space to which our current temporary premises in Lambeth act as an inspirational curtain-raiser.
So we know now how we got the physical space from there to here, and huge thanks are due to everyone who helped in the process, all of whom went above and beyond. No Turning Back itself, of course, will ask the much more challenging questions: ‘How did we get here?’ and, more teasingly, ‘Where do we go from here?’
Thanks to our volunteers who helped us to set up and staff our current exhibition: Alastair Wiltshire, Alex Siu, Alice Lepage, Alizeh Hameed, Anna Marsden, Ariadna Martinez, Assunta Nicolini, Beatrice Burrows, Beth Taylor, Brenda Martinez, Beatrice Duguid Cox, Emily Rose Edwards, Gargie Ahmad, Holly Langham, Jasmine Jones, Jessica O’Connor-Tomlin, Jessica Lumanisha, John Gomez, Koto Akiyoshi, Kyriaki Kamenou, Lara Ertener, Maria Pintado, Max Evans, Mona Jamil, Naheed Bilgrimi, Nathan Evans, Rosa Evans, Sam Cumming, Sophie Rees Rumney, Tanya Costa and Uzma Ravat.
In 2010, Simon James took a series of photographs for an exhibition which he called Home, 2010. This was a series of portraits with handwritten answers to a questionnaire alongside the photos. The questionnaire asked the subjects of their photos a series of factual questions –name, home town, nationality, part of London they lived in, occupation, time of arrival in the UK, mode of transport to the UK – together with some that were more opinion-based: what did they find the strangest thing about England, what was their favourite British food, did they every plan to go back home to live (and, if so, when), what they did in London that they never did back home, and what they most missed about home. The portraits and the questionnaires can be viewed on Simon’s website.
Simon James‘s ‘Home, 2010’ exhibition, first shown as part of ‘Alien Nation: the art of blending in’, Great Western Studios, London. March–April, 2011.
In his notes to the exhibition, Simon framed the collection in this way:
‘One should not be an alien at all.’
George Mikes, How To Be An Alien (1946)Mikes’s book highlights the absurd cultural contradictions between England and continental Europe. England is a nation of immigrants. Throughout history waves of immigrants have chosen London as their new home.
Ten of the twelve most recent accession nations to the EU have been eastern and central European countries. Citizens from these nations are entitled to work in the UK, but have limited access to benefits and social provision. Since 2004 there has been a noticeable increase in migration from these countries to the UK.
Many of these new arrivals have been met not only with scepticisim but sometimes also with hostility. They found a very different England from the one they had expected.
It is these people that you see in these photographs.
These beautifully constructed portraits hint at common experiences of migration: almost to a person, what the subjects most missed about home was family, friends and food. Similarly, despite a clearly critical position on British cuisine, there was general admiration for Sunday roasts, steak pie and those two other stalwarts of British eating: fish and chips (ours courtesy of the Portuguese) and pizza (our national Italian dish). And the things that they found strange about England and Britain held few surprises: driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, separate hot and cold water taps and, again, food.
Simon and the Migration Museum Project were in discussion again earlier this year, when the exhibition at Roast Restaurant in Borough Market was being planned. Reluctantly, we decided that his photos didn’t quite meet the criteria of that exhibition, but we ended up talking about a follow-up to Home, 2010, to see how the subjects’ answers to the questionnaire might have changed in the wake of the June 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. An e-mail was duly sent out to everyone he’d photographed, asking them to give their answers now to the opinion-type questions on the original questionnaire.
The people whose photographs appear in this blog answered the e-mail, and their answers are given here underneath the original photos of Simon’s 2010 exhibition. There’s nothing scientific about this ‘research’, of course, but the set of eight answers gives a sense of the mobility (or temporary nature) of migration – many subjects had gone on elsewhere or returned home (and we could speculate endlessly about the reasons the others didn’t answer the e-mail) – and a hint of a darkening mood since last June. Maciek, who in 2010 had said he had no plans to go home, now writes ‘Yes, very soon! If not Poland, then France/Italy’; Arleta, who previously wasn’t sure, is now thinking about it; Filip and Hanna have both left already (as they had said they would in 2010), Hanna now citing that the thing she finds strangest about England is ‘Brexit’. It would be interesting to track down more ‘before’ and ‘after’ stories of this kind and to revisit these eight subjects in a year or two’s time: it is often a useful corrective to have anecdotal and human evidence set against the statistical findings trotted out by competing positions on Britain’s departure from the EU.
Arleta, and her responses in 2010. © Simon James
Filip, and his responses in 2010. © Simon James
Hanna, and her responses in 2010. © Simon James
Joanna, and her responses in 2010. © Simon James
Macíek, and his responses in 2010. © Simon James
Māria, and her responses in 2010. © Simon James
Monika, and her responses in 2010. © Simon James
Wojciech, and his responses in 2010. © Simon James
There is more information about Simon James, and more of his photographs, on his website:
www.shotbyjam.com
