Celebrating Black History Month: Lanre Bakare for We Were There

**Topping & Company Black History Month Festival**

'A vital corrective that enhances our understanding of black British history' STEVE MCQUEEN

We Were There is a crucial new portrait of a modern Black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored - the one that exists beyond London.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Britain was in tumult: rocked by Margaret Thatcher's radical economic policy, the rise of the National Front, widespread civil unrest. With anti-immigration policies in the political mainstream, Black lives were on the frontline of a racial reckoning - but it was also a time of unrivalled Black cultural creation, organising and resistance. This was the crucible in which modern Britain came into existence.

This book spotlights, for the very first time, the extraordinary Black lives in once-rich cities now home to failing industries: the foundries of Birmingham, the docks of Liverpool and Cardiff, the mills of Bradford. We are in Wigan, Wolverhampton, Manchester and the green expanse of the British countryside. We meet feminists and Rastafarians, academics and pan-Africanists, environmental campaigners and rugby-league superstars; witness landmark campaigns against miscarriages of justice; encounter radical groups of artists and pioneering thinkers; tread dancefloors that hosted Northern Soul all-nighters and the birth of Acid House.

Lanre Bakare is a Guardian arts and culture correspondent focusing on the intersection of art, race and culture across multiple disciplines.