Last week, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, revealed that the Overground tube line would be split up and renamed to honour and celebrate “different parts of London’s unique local history and culture”. The newly renamed lines include Lioness, Mildmay, Liberty and, perhaps most controversially, Windrush. Announced just three months before the London mayoral election in May, only time will tell as to whether or not Khan will end up regretting this showy £6m project. My own feelings on the renaming are complicated.
The Windrush line connects two places I have called home for most of my life. I was born in Hackney, around the corner from the Claudia Jones Organisation, which supports predominantly African-Caribbean women and their families. I was brought up on the scent of jerk chicken wafting over Dalston, seeing “provisions” such as yam, plantain and sweet potato hawked at Ridley Road market, hearing the sound of steel pans leading performers down the streets for the Hackney carnival, and reading children’s stories in the radical Centerprise bookshop, which specialised in African-Caribbean literature and history. Since 2011, I have lived in south-east London, mainly Peckham – colloquially called Little Lagos because of the large west-African community that lives here, but where I’m also likely to hear the odd Jamaican twang in the mass of people who head down to Rye Lane on the weekend to pick up their groceries, hair products, a patty from Angels Bakery or jerk chicken from JB’s Soulfood.
Flattened by gentrification and slowing migration though they may be, aspects of African-Caribbean heritage, our culture, remain alive and well in Peckham and Hackney, and I can see the logic in trying to preserve parts of it long-term through this renaming project. While the 1948 Windrush boat wasn’t the first ship carrying Caribbean passengers to the UK in the 40s, and plenty of black Britons lived in London before that date, too, since the late 90s it has become a somewhat useful linguistic way of capturing that rush of people – the first mass migration of black British citizens to the “mother country”. People like my grandparents, who came and developed the infrastructure of key services and job roles: transport, healthcare, factory production. The thought of the line being renamed to something that speaks so specifically to my life and experiences does feel good.
The problem is, both at the time and to this day, their contributions to British society were never really valued. While it is tempting to dismiss rightwing naysayers who are condemning the “wokery” of the project, the voices we should be listening to are those of the campaigners who are dismayed at yet another seemingly hollow attempt to celebrate the Windrush generation while British Caribbean people, and other Commonwealth citizens, are still suffering the indignity of having been threatened with bogus immigration claims, and in the worst cases, deported, during the Windrush scandal. Just last month it was reported that a record number of Windrush compensation claims were rejected in 2023, and that more than 50 people have died while waiting for claims to the scheme to be processed.
When in 2018 the prime minister, Theresa May (who as home secretary oversaw the introduction of the “hostile environment” policy that led to the scandal), announced that Windrush Day would be celebrated annually on 22 June, I was sceptical – it seemed to me that the Windrush generation was being used for a PR stunt. But slowly, over the years, there has been a reclamation of the day. The events I attended last year felt politically charged and community-minded. They were about celebration, but not at the cost of ignoring the harm caused by the government.
It’s worth pointing out that Khan has no jurisdiction over the Windrush compensation scheme. But even so, I wonder if his timing could have been better. If this renaming can be used as a catalyst for a further push to get the Windrush generation the compensation they deserve then maybe, like Windrush Day, it could come to be seen as a positive gesture of recognition. But until then, as a petition from the campaigning magazine the Lead puts it: “We don’t want gestures, we want justice. And we want it now.” The magazine is demanding that all compensation payouts are made by Christmas 2024. The Windrush generation will not be with us for much longer. They must see justice in their lifetimes.
• Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff is a freelance journalist
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