It was in a less-than-glamorous lecture hall at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1982 that the First National Black Art Convention took place. In attendance were art students and teachers, including Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, and Lubaina Himid, who would go on to become the darlings of the British art world. One of the first to speak at the convention was British-Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen, who set the tone for the day. ‘Black art can’t be about the past’, declared Araeen. ‘Black art can’t be about magic. It is about the present reality. . .. [T]o be Black is to be political.’

The Blk Art Group collective that was formed out of the convention would go on to transform British culture and create a new black British visual identity, but word of their efforts did not linger in historical memory. It did not even travel as far as fifteen minutes down the road of the same town where I grew up in the 1990s, sadly never knowing about this boundary-pushing group. Black British history had little staying power in the cultural memory of that era, barely existing in the media. The New Labour government paid lip service to the concept of multiculturalism, but there was little to connect my Jamaican immigrant family to the new small island we resided on.

Today, the gaps in British cultural history are being filled thanks to the tireless efforts of black British activists, filmmakers, and writers. The films of Steve McQueen, including the Small Axe series and Blitz, depict Caribbean communities throughout twentieth-century London, and in texts such as Renni Eddo-Lodge’s groundbreaking 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Jason Okundaye’s 2023 black queer history Revolutionary Acts, mainstream British publishing seems to be becoming more comfortable with recognising the simple fact that black stories are British stories too.

But much of the focus has often landed on the experiences of African and Caribbean communities in the capital. While London was once the city where the majority of black British people lived, the last census showed that this statistic has now flipped, and the places where the majority of black communities now reside are cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Leicester. We Were There, the first book by Guardian journalist Lanre Bakare, seeks to tell the stories of these communities, who have been in existence for far longer than many may realise.

We Were There is a labour of love for the black British, Bradford-born writer Bakare, who describes the book as ‘a road trip around Black Britain in the Thatcher era’. Thatcher looms large over the book, particularly in the impact of her infamous 1978 appearance on World In Action, where she spoke about Britain being ‘swamped with people with a different culture’. The book spans the period from 1977, two years before she took office, to 1990, the year of her resignation. It focuses on the complex histories of black people in industrial cities like Manchester and Wolverhampton, the long-standing multicultural communities in the docks of Liverpool and Cardiff, the overlooked black influences in northern England and Scotland, and black environmentalists who in that era sought to engage with the British countryside.

Today, for many black people who grew up in the towns and cities mentioned in Bakare’s book, there will most likely be more than a few revelations about their hometown they would wish they had been more aware of growing up. Bakare shines a light on largely uncovered stories of the displacement of black British communities to make way for redevelopment in Manchester, as well as the racist murder of Somali student Axmed Abuukar Sheekh in 1989 in Edinburgh, which drew attention to institutional police racism four years before the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence. These hidden black histories show how close one can be to the truth about black British contributions without ever realising it.

The chapters that open and close We Were There are parallel stories of the black influence on modern British pop culture. They focus firstly on stories of black youth who were drawn to the primarily white Northern Soul movement in England’s North in the late 1970s, and then on the black artists, dancers, and DJs who played a galvanising role in 1990s club culture. Both have been marginalised in conventional white histories of those movements. By the 1990s, Bakare notes, the persistent efforts of black British people pushing for equality and inclusion allowed black creatives to reshape British culture. The result was not perfect, but it was a far more welcome one than the reality that faced black Northern Soul fans who described feeling torn when dancing to black American music that was largely associated with white British culture.

The most striking takeaway from We Were There is the everyday resistance that black British communities took part in. An early chapter focuses on the story of George Lindo, who moved to the UK from Jamaica in 1968, settling with his family in Bradford, where he worked as a wool spreader for the Tyersal Combing Company. In 1977, Lindo was framed by the Bradford police for the robbery of £67 from a betting shop and convicted by an all-white jury the following year. We learn about the community leaders who fought for his release, eventually securing the overturning of Lindo’s conviction, who walked free from Preston Prison in 1979.

In Birmingham, defiance by any means was the game, whether by academics like Stuart Hall who exposed the BBC’s promotion of racist values under the pretense of neutrality with the landmark 1979 documentary It Ain’t Half Racist Mum, or by the city’s burgeoning Rastafarian community which openly resisted everything that encompassed white supremacy, including western capitalism, beauty standards, and the West Midlands Police.

In early 1980s Liverpool, home to one of the country’s oldest black communities, the statue of William Huskisson, a Tory MP and financier who supported slavery, was toppled to the ground to applause by black locals, who no longer wanted this violent reminder of the British state looking down on them. These stories mirror the black-led organised activism that has been more widely covered in the wake of Black Lives Matter (namely, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol) and show how the biggest wins of black communities all have precedents in the hard-won efforts of previous generations.

As anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to be the driving force of UK politics, from last summer’s riots to the ongoing success of Reform UK, the vision put forward in We Were There is a useful guide to how communities of colour can fight back. Black British communities in the UK are long established, have their own cultural traditions, and have fought to be recognised as citizens of this country. By fully understanding where they have been, black communities can radically imagine where they will go next.