A recent west Indian migrants group in Britain

One afternoon in May 1955, I went down to the south London district of Brixton, to make a reconnaissance for a study of west Indian migrants in British. As I turned off the main shopping street, I was immediately overcome with a sense of strangeness, almost of shock. The street was a fairly typical south London side street, grubby and narrow, lined with cheap cafes, shabby pubs and flashy clothing-shops. All this was normal enough. But what had stuck me so forcibly was that almost all the people in sight were black.