Ambivalent Attachments to Place in London: Twelve Barbadian Families

There are good reasons for assuming that places symbolic for and valued by black people exist in Britain, One such locale is London's Notting Hill, which was, with Brixton, one of the two earliest zones of Afro-Caribbean settlement in the metropolis from the mid-1950s onwards. Notting Hill was also, in 1958, the locus of riots by young white people against black immigrants; the site of the Mangrove Restaurant, associated with the Black Power movement, and harassed continually by the police from its establishment in 1969 until its demise in 1991, Also, most notably, this area is the venue for the vast, annual, black-accented Notting Hill street carnival. These attributes did not, however, seem to engender strong responses in interviews with a set of twelve families of Barbadian origin. The interviewees, now materially successful, no longer inhabited the neighborhood, nor did their London-raised adult children. For the thirty-four interviewees, Notting Hill was a place that might once have been important for black people, but was no longer greatly valued for any such symbolisms; its looming gentrification by whites, for example, was not viewed with regret. This weak attachment to the place Notting Hill—or indeed to any other purportedly ‘black’ locales in London or Britain—has multiple sources in the particularity of this set of respondents: middle-class, respectable, generally conservative, homeowners, many of whom exhibit marked Barbadian island chauvinism. Most strikingly, some of the households still, after over thirty years in London, view themselves only as sojourners in Britain, who will before long return home to Barbados. Indeed, at least one household already has.