The ecological heritage of the Windrush generation

Hannah McGurk

May 2026

In this cover story, I explore how my master’s thesis, ‘An environmental history of the Windrush generation,’ is informing and shaping my doctoral project on Caribbean herbal medicine as heritage. How and in what ways has Caribbean heritage been shaped by mobility, ecologies and coloniality?

The ‘Windrush’ generation refers to the million or so people who moved from the Caribbean to Britain in the postwar period, the majority of whom were Jamaican, with peak migration taking place 1948–71 (Drake 2001, 84). Critically, the Windrush generation came as British citizens, welcomed and invited by British businesses and state ventures, only to encounter a ‘hostile’ environment (GOV.UK, n.d.), itself a continuation of colonial dynamics. The hostile environment took the shape of discriminatory policies and regulations across immigration, housing and employment. For my master’s in Cultural History, I analysed oral histories, newspapers, visual culture and official archival material to argue that relationships with the natural and built environment defined the Windrush generation, in ways that were both historically continuous and novel expressions of British coloniality. 

While my research explored various facets of the built and natural environment that influenced the factors for and experience of migration, here I will focus on just one – the garden. Discriminatory housing practices led to people living in the most dilapidated parts of cities: in some cases bombed out buildings, places marked for slum clearance and even underground bomb shelters (Wetherell 2020; Green-Briggs 2022; Colonial Office 1948). In the face of this environmental injustice, people turned to gardening and growing. Participants in the Garden Museum’s oral history project recalled memories of their parents planting edible plants as soon as they could, even in one-room, shared and temporary accommodation. Morgan Joseph’s mother grew potatoes and vegetables in their first flat in Paddington; Sylvia Hylton’s parents grew tomatoes, potatoes and an orange tree from a pip while sharing a room in Brixton (‘Sowing Roots: Caribbean Garden Heritage in South London’ 2023, 30, 32). For Earline Hilda Castillo Binger, born in Trinidad, growing was synonymous with settling down:  

When I came to London here and got married, in the family home, I started planting some fruit trees. My husband loved flowers and I once said to him, “Listen, darling, I cannot eat flowers.” […] I need to, if I’m going to have a home, to establish here and get married and have children, my two children, if I was going to have a garden here I wanted to have something I could eat, I could grow! (Castillo Binger 2021, 25.44).

As such, I argued that the idea of home for the Windrush generation included ecological entanglements; plants played an essential role in the making of homeplace. As bell hooks wrote (1990, 46), the task of making home for Black communities has not historically been a case of simply cleaning, washing or tending to a dwelling – ‘it was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination’. Putting down roots created a sense of belonging in and of itself. Making home (and garden) was therefore an act of resistance.

Now a Heritage Studies student, my PhD is based on the Caribbean collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and University Herbarium. I am working with pre-Columbian materials of Indigenous communities (namely ceramics, shells and sculpted objects) and 18th- and 19th-century plant specimens from across from the anglophone islands. These materials, together with their collection histories, have the potential to tell a powerful story about Caribbean ecological heritage and its colonial legacies. After Jamaica Kincaid’s provocation (2024, 164) that ‘memory is a gardener’s real palette’, I ask: what is the significance of environmental heritage for Caribbean communities today? How do communities want to protect and preserve it for the future? What role can museums play in decolonising this heritage, if at all? Through collections-based, archival, ethnographic and participatory research with communities in the Caribbean and the diaspora in the UK, I aim to contribute to an understanding of the enduring role of West Indian gardens, yards and landscapes in a heritage of care.

Bio 

Hannah is a PhD Candidate in Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and her MA in Cultural History from the University of Liverpool, where she was awarded the International Slavery Studies Scholarship (2024) and Andrew Douglas History MA Prize (2025). A scholar-activist of British Jamaican heritage, Hannah has worked with various groups and initiatives concerned with legacies of British colonialism, most recently with the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.

References 

Colonial Office. 1948. Clapham South Tube Shelters. HO 205/253. National Archives.

Drake, Julia. 2001. ‘From “Colour Blind” to “Colour Bar”: Residential Separation in Brixton and Notting Hill, 1948-75’. In Consensus or Coercion?: The State, the People and Social Cohesion in Post-War Britain, edited by Ross McKibbin and Lawrence Black. New Clarion Press. 

GOV.UK. n.d. ‘The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal: Independent Research Report (Accessible)’. Accessed 9 September 2025. 

Green-Briggs, Dorrel L. 2022. Caribbean Women’s Migration: Windrush Era Housing Experiences and Aspirations. AuthorHouse UK. 

Hooks, Bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Between-theLines. 

Kincaid, Jamaica. 2024. My Garden (Book). With Jill Fox. Picador. 

Mullings, Sonia, Earline ‘Hilda’ Castillo Binger, and Jen Kavanagh. 2021. ‘Caribbean Garden Heritage Project Archive, 5 July 2021 - 4 August 2021’. Garden Museum. 

‘Sowing Roots: Caribbean Garden Heritage in South London’. 2023. Garden Museum Journal, no. 41: 62. 

Wetherell, Sam. 2020. ‘“Redlining” the British City’. Renewal (London, England) (London) 28 (2): 81–89.