This Lovely City

Author/Guide: Louise Hare

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1940s: A novel about the Windrush generation

ISBN: B07TBJ2FXV
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

With the Blitz over and London reeling from war, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England’s call for help. Fresh off the Empire Windrush, he’s taken a tiny room in south London lodgings, and has fallen in love with the girl next door.

Touring Soho’s music halls by night, pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home – and it’s alive with possibility. Until, one morning, he makes a terrible discovery.

As the local community rallies, fingers of blame are pointed at those who had recently been welcomed with open arms. And, before long, the newest arrivals become the prime suspects in a tragedy which threatens to tear the city apart.

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Travel Guide

Travel around Soho and Clapham Common with the Windrush community

The Windrush scandal concerns people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and even wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Many of those affected had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries as members of the “Windrush generation.”

They were named after the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought one of the first groups of West Indian migrants in 1948.

This Lovely City explores the years following Windrush, and the lives of those who sailed from the Caribbean in search of a new life. They were promised a new life and a new future but the reality was far different. What they got was poverty and racism and their struggles were many.

Recently the struggles of the Windrush generation has been in the news once again so this novel is very timely.