Immigration History

Forty-four years since the Chronicle’s first edition. Ninety quarterly editions. Seventy-eight years since the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. This special edition takes stock of the community in 2026: what four generations of Black British Caribbean life have built, what the Windrush scandal and its aftermath have revealed and not resolved, and what the community’s fourth and fifth generations are inheriting from those who came before them.

Since January 1982, the Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update has published ninety quarterly editions chronicling the life of the Caribbean community in Britain and its ties to Jamaica. Covering forty-four years of history — from the Toxteth riots and the Scarman Report to the Windrush scandal and its aftermath, from Thatcher’s first term to the present — the series constitutes the most sustained quarterly record of Black British life ever assembled. This commemorative edition brings the complete archive together.