The George Padmore Institute is happy to announce we have been awarded an Arts Council National Lottery Project Grant to deliver our exciting project: Reaching New Generations. Following on from the extremely successful Writer-in-Residency of award-winning poet Jay Bernard in 2018, we will host two diverse writers to create two children’s books,using our archives to draw on the real history of Black British communities in the UK. The published books will continue the Institute’s goals of showcasing to all generations the stories of the communities of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in Britain.

We will also launch a new website and publish short films that delve into the history and background of the Institute’s archival collections, such as the New Cross Massacre and the Caribbean Artists Movement among many others. The website will include a new user-friendly searchable catalogue to help researchers and everyone interested in the history of the diverse communities which have played an essential role in British life since the 1950s. We are lucky to be able to feature the artwork of the Caribbean-British artist Errol Lloyd on the new website. He is recognised for having done much pioneering work for black art, beginning in the 1960s, when he was one of the few artists who consciously chose to put black images at the centre of his work.

The recent Black Lives Matter protests highlight the urgent need for materials on Black British history. One of the ultimate goals of our project will be to encourage publishers and educationalists to produce more reading material on Britain’s multicultural history for young people of all backgrounds.