Len Garrison

The sari shop, the Golden Mile, Leicester

Sales assistants at a sari shop on the Golden Mile. Refugees from East Africa were housed here when they first came in 1972. It was a dilapidated neighbourhood called Belgrave. Forty years after the settlement, Belgrave was recently renamed the Golden Mile, as it boasts the achievements and entrepreneurial skills of this proud and successful community. It is now a bustling shopping district. During Diwali, the festival of light, Belgrave attracts the largest crowd, outside of India.

Demonstration against new immigration rules, Trafalgar Square, 1979

The Thatcher government announced it was changing the immigration rules so that Commonwealth dependants would find it even harder still to enter Britain. People were outraged and in November 1979 thousands came from all over the UK to protest in London. In parliament the Tory MP Tony Marlow shamefully claimed that racism amongst British people was a ‘natural’ instinct. Tory politicians talked openly of repatriating immigrants. The Tories ignored the protests and the new immigration rules came into force in December 1979.

On board P & O Strathaird Australia, England, 1959

My family’s uprooting and exile to Papua New Guinea paradoxically catches me in reverse. Ostensibly a ‘native’ of PNG having been born there, my uprooting was at age 8, when along with my brother Ed, we were ‘repatriated’ to a life we had never known, so my formative years were broken up into one of estrangement, disorientation and homesickness for an idyllic childhood which had come to an end with being landed in the Spartan setting of a south London boarding school, where I was based for the next 10 years. Culture shock was my abiding memory of the latter part of that childhood, and I have always put some distance between myself and ‘British natives’, none of whom seem to have any idea whatsoever about how to live sustainably on this shrinking planet.