Young + Black + Male + Stop + Search

According to an examination of stop and search data (67.997 vehicles were stopped by officers) in London from July to September 2020, young black males were 19 times more likely to be stopped than the general population and 28 times more likely to be stopped on suspicion of carrying weapons (via).



“Being male and being aged under 35 are more powerful predictors of a group having a higher search rate than that group being non-white. The reasons for these differences are likely to be complex: many types of offending are concentrated among some groups (particularly young men) as well as in some neighbourhoods, and there are longstanding issues of bias and stereotyping among police and in society.” (via)

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photograph by James Barnor (wedding guest, London, 1964) via

Charlie Phillips: Photographing the Lives of Black Londoners

"His most iconic photograph of the period depicts a mixed-race Notting Hill Couple, taken almost a decade after the violent attacks. The intimate picture of a young pair conveys warmth, love and defiance. When understood in the racialised political context of the time, the image takes on a more complex meaning, especially since the Notting Hill riots had started with an assault on a Swedish woman who married to a Caribbean man — attacked for being in a mixed-race relationship." (via)



In 1956, Charlie Phillips was a teenager when he moved to London with his family from Jamaica. The British government had asked people from former colonies to rebuild the so-called mother country after the Second World War. Many of them - including Charlie's family - settled in North Kensington, Notting Hill, and Ladbroke Grove (via).



"I remember I came in late August. I found I couldn't walk barefoot. I couldn't go out in the garden."
During a time of changes and adjustment, Charlie Phillips got his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, which was given to him by a US-American serviceman stationed in the U.K. Overlooked for a long time in which his work was hardly noticed and he struggled to publish his pictures, his photographs are now "celebrated for sensitively and insightfully documenting the cultural landscape of black Britain in the post-war period: a time when the struggle for civil rights, justice, and equality was particularly hard-fought. Phillips continued hoping to pass down this document to his children (via).

The borough of North Kensington, where Phillips spent much of his youth, had high rates of poverty, crime and violence in the 1950s. People had been attracted from the West Indies by the promise of good jobs and homes, but the post-war period saw London plunged into a housing and employment crisis. Large numbers of Afro-Caribbean Londoners struggled to make a living and were forced to live in crammed, slum-like conditions. This situation was made worse by structural racism: British society upheld an unofficial ‘Colour Bar’, a systematic exclusion of black people from certain public and private spaces.
Despite the fact that those who had arrived from the colonies had British passports and enjoyed the same legal rights as their white counterparts, black British citizens faced everyday racism, social injustices and widespread patterns of discrimination. (...)
Captivated by his surroundings and profoundly influenced by the Notting Hill "riots", Phillips spent the best part of the 1960s and 1970s photographing the experience of transatlantic migration in North Kensington. “I attended demonstrations and continued to show solidarity with different struggles,” Phillips recalls. “The 60s and 70s were very challenging. People had begun to ask questions. It was an era where you had to decide who you sympathised with.” (via)

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photographs via

Nothing Beats A Londoner

Here we go, Nike celebrating diversity again, London's diversity.



"The new Cannes Social & Influencer Lions has its first Grand Prix winner: Nike’s “Nothing Beats a Londoner” from Wieden+Kennedy, London. A key component of the campaign is a short film--directed by the Megaforce collective and produced by Riff Raff Films--which centers on enterprising, fiercely competitive, young Londoners who shape sport and culture in the metropolis around them." (via)



image via

Stereotypes of East, West, South, and North London

"The language people use about places provides a valuable insight into this personal experience and the image may be studied through their descriptions. It is through these descriptions of places that stereotypes have the greatest potential for development. Stereotypes have been recognized as an important element in urban and regional perception (...)."
Jacquelin A. Burgess (1974)



According to a survey among 1294 Londoners carried out by YouGov in January 2014, each of the four London sub-regions has a distinct "brand". People were presented a list of adjectives and asked which of the four areas they associated with the adjectives (and stereotypes).The map based on the adjectives visualises the tendency to describe the regions mostly in a contrasting manner: the posh West, the poor East, the intellectual North, the rough South (via).



The "intellectual North" is associated with adjectives such as "cosmopolitan, suburban, rough, family friendly, and trendy", the "rough South" with "suburban, poor, cosmopolitan, up and coming, family friendly and gritty". The contrast between East and West is the most distinct one with the "poor East" being associated with "rough, dirty, gritty, up and coming, and cosmoplitan" and the "posh West" described as "cosmopolitan, suburban, trendy, pretentious, cultured and family friendly" (via). As Burgess (1974) says, stereotypes are an important element in urban perception. And, they emphasise differences.



Trent Gillaspie posted his "Judgmental Denver Map" on Facebook in January 2013. Since then, a great many stereotyped, opinionated, biased maps (among them London) have been submitted, some of them causing a lot of irritation. His motto: "As long as you offend everyone you possibly can, it ends up making it OK." (via). Interesting philosophy.

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- Burgess, J. A. (1974). Stereotypes and urban images. Area, 6(3), 167-171.
- photographs of London (one and two taken in Carnaby Street) via and via and via

Londinium, the multicultural metropolis

London - founded by the Romans, conquered by the Saxons and Normans, developed as a commercial centre by Italian, Flemish, and Baltic traders - is a multicultural metropolis, a truly international city with 100 different languages spoken in almost each of its boroughs (via). In the past, immigration brought new life styles, foods, music, ... The mix of different cultures is not new, "London always was a city of foreigners" who become an essential part of British culture. In fact, for "much of its history the percentage of Londoners born outside the capital was actually far higher than today" (via); 37% of its current population is foreign-born (via).



According to the 1981 census, for instance, more than one in six were born outside the UK (mainly in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean). This characteristic of London, however, did not start in the 1980s but much earlier. In his book "A City Full of People", historian Peter Earle states that around 1700, "a clear majority of Londoners had not been born in the capital" but in France, Spain, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Germany, Southern Europe, ... Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and in other parts of England (at the time, people from Cornwall, for instance, were perceived as "foreigners"). About 150 years later, under Queen Victoria, London was still a multicultural city. In the 1840s alone, 50.000 people arrived from Ireland fleeing the famine and by 1850, London's Jewish population had increased to ca. 20.000 leaping to 120.000 in the following fifty years. By 1800, there were several thousand Africans living in London and more and more people from South East Asia settled in the city (via).



Even in its early Roman days Londoners were "just as cosmopolitan and diverse" as they are today. According to new DNA findings, gladiators in London circa 50 A.D. may have come from North Africa and different parts of Europe. The cosmopolitan nature of ancient London may have drawn on people from all over the Roman Empire and it seems that London "hasn't changed all that much in character" (via).

"But the findings serve as a reminder that the past often looked very, very different from the all-white panoramas built in the years since. Especially somewhere like London, a crossroads from its very beginning." (via)

"And so today's fears of a multicultural capital are myopic, because that is exactly what London always was, during the centuries of greatness when it became the top city in the world." (via)




- interesting: The ethnic population of England and Wales broken down by local authorities, The Guardian, 2011, link
- all photographs of London by Inge Morath (1923-2002) via, copyright The Inge Morath Foundation - Magnum Photos, courtesy 'Clair Gallery, last photograph by Inge Morath (street corner at World's End, 1954) via; fog photograph taken in 1954, all the others in 1953