Colin Jones - The Black House

Publisher: Prestel
Year: 2006
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st Edition
Condition: Very Good
Pages: 120
Size: 240mm x 165mm

“Could you do something on mugging?” the Sunday Times editor asked Jones and journalist Peter Gillman in 1973. It was a time when the British press had seized on the issue of “mugging” as a means of stirring up moral panic over Black criminality, in turn creating a distraction from the crisis of capitalism.

Jones and Gillman decided to focus their story on a hostel located at 571 Holloway Road. The brainchild of dynamic Caribbean migrant Herman Edwards, it served as a halfway house for vulnerable, disenfranchised Afro-Caribbean teens. Some had been thrown out by their families, while many had left school with no qualifications, finding themselves drifting in and out of the criminal-justice system. The refuge was officially called “Harambee” (Swahili for “pulling together”). But those who frequented it knew the place, rather contentiously, as “the Black House”.