Black London Is Vibrant & Multifaceted. These Are The Places To Visit

The rich culture of London’s African and Caribbean communities can be experienced in restaurants, bars and cultural institutions.

Anyone who has explored London beyond its tourist hubs, or has at least glanced at the pages of a Zadie Smith novel, knows that multiculturalism gives the city its life. As a child, I accompanied my mother to buy ingredients for Nigerian dishes in Upton Park, an area of East London known for its South Asian community. And on neighbourhood streets, black hairdressers and barbershops are interspersed among halal butchers, traditional English cafes (called caffs) and Eastern European restaurants.

In a city so diffuse with diversity, where, then, is “Black London”? The community is particularly visible in places like Brixton and Peckham in South London, Hackney in the east and Notting Hill in the west. The rich culture of these African and Caribbean communities can be experienced in restaurants, bars and cultural institutions. Below are a few of those places.

Tasting Black London

On a street in the north London neighbourhood of Tottenham, the greeting “Welcome to Lagos” is printed on the door of Chuku’s. Within its salmon-coloured walls, staples of Nigerian cuisine take on a new life in sharing plates priced between £5 and £14 (about $11 to $39). For instance, chin chin, a dangerously addictive fried dough snack, serves as the foundation for cheesecake, and suya (grilled and well-seasoned pieces of beef or chicken) is reimagined here as sauce-laden meatballs.

Two siblings of Nigerian and Grenadian heritage founded Chuku’s as a way to introduce the uninitiated to Nigerian dining, and as a way for members of the diaspora to connect with their culture. “We’re Nigerians, we’re loud, we’re verbose,” said Ifeyinwa Frederick, one of the owners. “We wanted a buzzy atmosphere that represented that kind of vibrant, boisterous nature.”

This year, recognition of London’s West African cuisine came in the form of Michelin stars for two restaurants near Oxford St: Chishuru and Akoko. While less populist than Chuku’s, these restaurants also meld African flavours with Western traditions. On Akoko’s £120 ($259) tasting menu, plantain puffs have been served with beef tartare, and Gambian stew with Irish oysters. And at Chishuru, whose prix fixe dinner menu is priced at £95 ($205), egusi – a seed used in soup, usually served with pounded yam – flavours an icecream accompanying a meringue sponge.

The rise of these restaurants reflects a decades-long evolution of the makeup of Black London. Caribbeans were long the dominant Black community, and thus black culture, in London. In the 1980s and 1990s, migrants from West Africa – my parents among them – began to arrive in Britain for work and study in larger numbers, with many settling in areas like Peckham in South London, known as Little Lagos for its Nigerian community. These communities, now more established, are influencing the culture around them. “In the food and in the music and in what’s culturally meaningful and exciting, there’s much more of a shared and a real sort of emergent African emphasis,” said Jimi Famurewa, the author of Settlers: Journeys Through the Food, Faith and Culture of Black African London.

Emeka Frederick, the other co-owner of Chuku’s, sees the current moment as a kind of maturation. “When we were growing up, that community was just settling and putting down roots,” he said. “We roll it 30 years forward and it’s like that community is not only settled, it’s now – we’re feeling strong.”

Hearing Black London

Black London loves to party. Indeed, one of the biggest celebrations in the city comes from the Caribbean community: Notting Hill Carnival, an annual event in West London, attended by hundreds of thousands every August.

For year-round revelry, however, visitors could navigate the streets of Peckham to Jumbi, a hi-fi music bar that emanates cool. The spot, which opened in 2022, is an ode to the owners’ Caribbean heritage and is named for a figure in Caribbean folklore. These roots are reflected in the music and food. Park yourself at a table, enjoy oxtail in Trinidadian flatbread ($30), sip on Caribbean-inspired cocktails, and later head to the dance floor. In the same neighbourhood, the Prince of Peckham pub is an excellent candidate for late-night dancing to hip-hop and R&B, and Caribbean food.

For live music, Troy Bar is an unassuming place on an even more unassuming road off East London’s Old St, an area filled with bars and restaurants. Troy Bar’s vibe is comfortable, almost living room-like – as is its food: home-style, affordable Caribbean staples like curry goat, jerk chicken and grilled fish, for £7 ($15) a plate. It also offers an open-mic night on Tuesdays, reggae on Thursdays and jazz on Fridays.

For the club-inclined, young black nightlife has been somewhat defined in recent years by the rise of the party companies Recess and DLT, both run by groups of black British men. Recess’ club nights have taken place in venues across the city, including Fabric, and this year, the company hosted a 15,000-person party in Tottenham. Check for upcoming events on Recess and DLT’s websites.

Jojo Sonubi, a co-founder of Recess, said the company was born out of what he saw as a gap in London’s nightlife, allowing young black Londoners to come together and bask in Afrobeats, reggae, dancehall and amapiano, as well as the homegrown genres of grime and UK rap. “Playing those popular sounds among familiar people who are in tune with what’s hot right now,” Jojo said, “it builds a nice little feeling that people want to tap into.”

One place where works by black artists can be glimpsed in London is Autograph, a gallery in trendy Shoreditch in the east of the city. Currently, previously unseen works by Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode hang in a room on the second floor. The portraits are part of the exhibition The Studio – Staging Desire and, like much of his work, explore Black queer self-expression: The subjects are nude, contorted, emboldened. The exhibition runs until March.

Autograph, formerly known as the Association of Black Photographers, was founded in 1988 in the South London neighbourhood of Brixton. Fani-Kayode, who lived and worked in Brixton for six years until his death in 1989, was one of its founders. Today, the gallery is based at Rivington Place, a grey and black angular building designed by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye.

The gallery champions the exploration of identity and social justice through still and moving images, as seen in exhibitions like Fani-Kayode’s and Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos, a celebration of the mood of the Nigerian city in the 1970s, on view through March.

At Tate Britain, the work of Fani-Kayode, alongside other black photographers, including Joy Gregory and Ajamu X, is currently on display in The 80s: Photographing Britain, which captures the political and social change of the decade (tickets, $43). The museum also offers tours that explore the influence of people of African and Caribbean heritage on British art.

As you head from the nearby tube station to the museum’s grounds next to the Thames, look for Iniva, or the Institute of International Visual Arts, an organisation based on the campus of Chelsea College of Arts. Its small and cosy library, named for Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, is filled with books and dotted with tables. There, the organisation displays exhibits amid its stacks. Its latest is Global Resiliencies, an exploration of zines as a tool of political resistance.

Exploring Brixton

Windrush Square, a leafy public plaza at the centre of Brixton, is laden with history. It takes its name from the ship on which Caribbean migrants arrived in Britain in 1948 – the images of its arrival became symbolic of postwar mass migration.

It is apt, then, that the square is home to the Black Cultural Archives, a repository for photography, letters and journals that chart the history of black communities in Britain. The organisation also supported members of the Windrush generation (West Indian migrants who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1973) who were caught in a Government crackdown. Some were deported or declared immigrants who had entered illegally.

The archive’s public space includes a room with a timeline of black history in Britain, with dates, notably, that stretch before the arrival of the Windrush, including the presence of Africans in the court of James IV of Scotland. Its current exhibition explores the work of Race Today, a journal that covered black British life and activism in the 1970s and 1980s. Admission costs £3 ($6.50).

About 10 minutes from the archive is the Brixton Village market, a labyrinthine jumble of restaurants and produce stores, clothes and jewellery outlets, and trinket and art shops. Here you can see a mural of prominent black Britons like poet Benjamin Zephaniah, sit outdoors at the Caribbean restaurant Fish, Wings & Tings, or head to the Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurant Light of Africa. Or you can shop at Round Table Books, a colourful independent bookstore run by three women of colour who are incredibly helpful when it comes to recommendations.

In describing the black community’s influence in Brixton, Lisa Anderson, the director of the Black Cultural Archives, might as well be describing its impact throughout London. People from the Caribbean and Africa, she said, “poured in the value of their ingenuity, their resilience, their culture, their modes of survival, and transformed this place.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Desiree Ibekwe.

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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