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Estelle is driving through Fulham when it hits her - a wave of nostalgia so powerful it leaves her laughing, slightly stunned. “This is blowing my mind,” she says over the phone, as she rolls past the streets where she once caught the bus, balancing dreams of stardom with shifts at a supermarket. “I’m having a whole time right now.”
Now based in Los Angeles, Estelle might be thousands of miles away, but west London still lingers in her bones - the voices, the familiar streets, the shopfronts she once walked past daily. This is where her story starts. Born in Hammersmith in 1980, the second of nine children to a Senegalese mother and Grenadian father. She became a standout voice in 2000s British music, weaving hip-hop, reggae, soul and R&B into a sound that was unmistakably hers.
