Digitally Mapping Caribbean London: Urban Strolls in the 1950S BBC Radio Archive

Abstract

This article uses Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to digitally map depictions of urban London by Caribbean writers, including George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, and Carlisle Chang. Through extensive archival work, including the examination of numerous heretofore unexplored BBC scripts of the 1940s and 1950s, this article identifies a genre of ‘urban stroll’ narratives written and broadcast by Caribbean writers of the period. By mapping these texts, this article revises critical stereotypes about the ways that Caribbean immigrants inhabited and represented London, rejecting the focus on the precarious urban narrative. This article also suggests ways that digital mapping can facilitate new reading practices that take into account metropolitan spatial relations and their attendant power dynamics.

Keywords:

• George Lamming
• Andrew Salkey
• BBC Caribbean Voices
• GIS
• digital mapping

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See not only his well-known criticism of emigration in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), but also his mid-century radio work, dating to the previous decade (Fabrizio, ‘George Lamming’).

2 As Darrell Newton explains, educational programmes that emphasised English cultural history were common on the BBC Colonial Service during this period, even as they were widely denigrated by Caribbean audiences (38). Caribbean writers of the period as diverse as George Lamming and V S Naipaul have similarly criticised the centrality of English literature and English sites in British colonial education. Naipaul notes that ‘in the schools, the children read poems about daffodils and daisies which most of them … will never see’ (‘12 December 1954’).