‘A vital corrective that enhances our understanding of black British history by moving the narrative outside of London’
Steve McQueen
‘Essential, unique and joyful. It broadens our story and ensures that the scale of our influence across the UK is fully recognised and appreciated. Utterly brilliant’
Dipo Faloyin, author of Africa Is Not A Country
‘An urgent conversation about Britishness and the breadth of black British experience … Affecting and insightful’
Arifa Akbar, author of Consumed
‘A revelation … told with such love and tender, evocative prose that it immediately colourises the present’
Nesrine Malik, author of We Need New Stories
‘An important and ambitious book. Bakare has found the right stories and language to do it justice’
Andy Beckett, author of Promised You A Miracle
‘Fascinating … told with pace, wit, scholarship, and nuance – it taught me so much’
Ed Caesar, author of The Moth and the Mountain
‘Full of energy and purpose … We Were There will help you see Britain with completely fresh eyes’
Pragya Agarwal, author of Sway
‘An exquisitely cathartic and powerful journey through some of the most important yet untold chapters of our recent history … Tough but ultimately uplifting’
Gus Casely-Hayford, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum
We Were There is about a Black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored – the one that exists beyond London.
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. We are in Wigan, Wolverhampton, Manchester and the green expanse of the British countryside. We meet feminists and Rastafarians, academics and rugby-league superstars; witness landmark campaigns and encounter radical artists and thinkers; tread dancefloors that hosted Northern Soul all-nighters and the birth of Acid House.
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.
Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There decisively expands our sense of who we are. Confronting, joyful and thrilling, this is a profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain.