We Were There : How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain – Lanre Bakare

Hardback

384 pages

The Bodley Head

ISBN: 9781847927477

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Britain was in tumult: rocked by Margaret Thatcher’s radical economic policy, the rise of the National Front, widespread civil unrest. With anti-immigration policies in the political mainstream, Black lives were on the frontline of a racial reckoning.

But it was also a time of unrivalled Black cultural creation, organising and resistance. This was the crucible in which modern Britain came into existence. We Were There brings into the spotlight for the first time extraordinary Black lives in once-rich cities now home to failing industries: the foundries of Birmingham, the docks of Liverpool and Cardiff, the mills of Bradford.

London was only ever part of the picture – We Were There is about incorporating a vastly broader range of Black Britons into the fabric of our national story.