How the Windrush reached Brockley

When the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury on 21 June 1948, five of its passengers, travelling from Jamaica, gave the same intended address in London: Wickham Road, Brockley.^[1] They were among the first Caribbean arrivals in an area that, within a few years, held one of south-east London's growing Caribbean communities.^[2]

The houses that made it possible

Brockley's grand Victorian houses had been built for single wealthy families. After the Second World War, most were divided into separate flats and let room by room.^[1] The council gave grants to convert houses into flats, and between 1945 and the 1960s it was hard to get a bank loan for any property built before 1914, so the larger old houses were split up.^[1]

The result was a supply of cheap rooms in big houses. In the 1950s and 1960s these rooms became the first homes for many newly arrived Caribbean residents, a number of whom found work in nearby Deptford.^[1]

A wider migration

The Caribbean arrivals were not the only newcomers. Over the same years, migrants came from Turkey, Cyprus, Italy and South Asia, especially Sri Lanka.^[1] The same conditions drew them: large subdivided houses, low rents and work in the surrounding industrial areas.

The Windrush itself became the symbol of this migration. Its 1948 voyage was not the first to bring West Indians to Britain, but it is the one remembered, and its name now stands for the whole post-war Caribbean generation.^[2] That generation settled across Lewisham, with New Cross, Deptford and Brockley among its centres.^[2]

A name on the railway

In February 2024, Transport for London gave names to six London Overground lines. The route through Brockley station, which had opened as the East London line extension in May 2010, was named the Windrush line.^[2][3]

The name records what the 1948 arrivals began. The five passengers who wrote down Wickham Road that summer were at the front of a migration that changed Brockley, and the trains that now run through the area carry its name.^[1][2]

Sources

1. 1.^

   Brockley, Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brockley

2. 2.^

   HMT Empire Windrush, Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMT_Empire_Windrush

3. 3.^

   Brockley railway station, Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brockley_railway_station