Strangers in our midst

Colin Grant once more brings us the voices of the British migrant experience too often ignored

Photo by Howard Grey. All Rights Reserved 2026 / Bridgeman Images

In 1986, cultural theorist Stuart Hall delivered a series of seminars on English culture in Naples. “If you live in England for long enough,” he said, “you might come to think that if the English are not re-educated about themselves, they will murder us all in our beds.” The sentiment reflects the experience of many colonial migrants. Hall arrived in England from Jamaica in 1951, a journey recounted in his memoir Familiar Stranger and referred to in Colin Grant’s What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain. Grant’s parents undertook the same journey across the Atlantic as part of the Windrush generation. Leaving their homeland, they carried “an ambivalence towards Britain with them… compounded by the hostility they met here”.

The author, raised in multiracial Luton, feels his country’s current mood has come to resemble the “toxic” 1960s and 1970s, “when migrants and their families were viewed with great suspicion”. Reminiscent of Powellite bluster and National Front aggression, “ugly anti-migrant protests” have “ripped through Britain in recent years”. As the word migrant, Grant notes, is “weaponised by right-wingers”, his new book seeks to redress the balance by presenting a “truer picture of England and the UK”.

Whereas his parents’ Caribbean peers were subjects of a previous book, Homecoming, Grant widens the lens for his latest offering, collating a diversity of postwar to present-day stories of migration to Britain from across the globe. The author – who once worked as a radio producer for the BBC World Service – acts as curator of this oral history project, inspired by the likes of Humphrey Jennings, the documentarian behind the 1930s “Mass Observation” surveys of the public. Grant contributes thematic introductions and childhood memories to open each chapter before interviewees, recorded over a three-year period, speak for themselves. The oldest contributor is Bhikhu Parekh – now 91 – whose 2000 commission on “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” (on which Hall also served) urged the nation to declare itself “multicultural” and believes stifling minority culture kills society’s “impulse to experiment”.

The book contains myriad tales of migrant ingenuity, from finding work to ways of getting here in the first place. Journalist Suzanne from Cork – who cites a steady diet of Smash Hits, the Face and the NME, magazines that pushed teenage girls to move to London – disembarks the “abortion express” at Victoria Coach Station with two books (Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel, Less Than Zero, and Joe Orton’s diaries), a pair of Doc Martens and a psychiatrist’s note. Florida flees conflict in Eritrea having jumped on the back of a “lorry full of onions” as a child, before navigating the care system and police detention to eventually hold down a job in education. A Pole and an Iranian hustle for hospitality gigs in hotels. Tulela, meanwhile, having picked up English watching CBeebies in Namibia, travelled to Nottingham in 2018 and now works as a forensic psychologist.

There are bursts of birthplace nostalgia – Dulani’s strong “olfactory memories” of Sri Lankan “chilli roasting in September”; Snežana watching Yugoslav TV’s Mr Bean and Benny Hill broadcasts. But Grant’s interlocutors are also eager to offer current insights into British sensibilities. Clementine from Cameroon, forever interacting with people living on the streets, finds herself mirroring her fellow Glaswegians by adopting their habit of “acquiring distance from other people and their issues”. Eleftheria, born in Crete, is now prone to “performing politeness publicly rather than actually being polite”.

In presenting these storytelling snapshots, the author might hope his birth country admits, at last, it would be “grievously diminished” without migrants. However, the host society’s widespread hostility to their presence has led many to lead separate lives, likely to identify with other migrants from any background “as a class or defined group”. Grant convincingly describes this as a version of the African American writer WEB Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” – according to which one only fully interacts with those who share a common identity while remaining “semi-detached” from mainstream culture.

Ideally, in a globalised age at the end of empire, 21st-century Britain will come to see migrants not as familiar strangers, but part of a universal human experience. As Clementine puts it, “I’m neither foreign nor native when I dance.”