Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2025. How does it feel to be shortlisted and what would winning mean to you?
I am thrilled to be shortlisted for an award that has been associated with so many of my intellectual heroes. This is especially the case because Multicultural Britain is a deeply personal history, one rooted in my childhood experiences growing up in inner-city Birmingham. It is hard to contemplate the idea of winning, but I am hopeful that being shortlisted will help bring my ideas to new readers. If it helps shift the debate about multiculturalism in Britain even in a small way I will feel like the project has been a success.
What was the inspiration behind Multicultural Britain?
In the 1990s I went to primary school in inner-city Birmingham. I was one of only a handful of white pupils. Most of my friends’ families came from the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean and other places that had once been colonized by Britain. To this day, many people find the idea of a white person being in the minority a nightmarish scenario. But for me, it was a formative experience. The friendships I made, and the kind of rough and ready familiarity we had with ethnic diversity, told me there was another side to the often-hysterical coverage of issues like immigration and multiculturalism in this country.
I always hoped I would write about this one day. But I only felt able to do so when some years ago I discovered a vast, previously unseen archive of photographs taken by the American photographer Janet Mendelsohn. The photographs were taken in the 1960s in Balsall Heath, the same area where decades later I attended school. It is a remarkable insight into an earlier period of ethnic diversity – what I call ‘everyday multiculturalism’. That was when the idea for what has become Multicultural Britain really started to take shape.
Why do you feel it is important to celebrate history writing?
We live in divided times, where some of the most powerful leaders in the world are once again taking power by demonising minorities and marginalised groups like asylum seekers. History not only allows us to see more clearly the roots of this kind of politics. It also encourages us to recognise the complexities of societal problems, and our own relationship to them. Ultimately, we should celebrate the potential of history writing to give us the confidence to demand a better world by learning from the mistakes of the past.
Was there a particular writer, book, experience or event that first made you interested in history?
My maternal grandfather was the Irish social historian K.H. Connell. I never met him. Tragically, he died by suicide before I was born. For a long time I felt uncomfortable talking in public about him, especially when – by a bizarre twist of fate – I ended up landing a job at the very same university he was at when he died. Every day on the way to my office I walk past a portrait of him, which I kept a secret for years. But the process of writing Multicultural Britain gave me the confidence to engage with my relationship to him more explicitly. I wanted to interrogate the diversity of my own family background in the book. A big part of this was writing about what my grandfather described as our family’s “Irish peasant stock”. Doing so was a way of trying to encourage readers to recognise the diversity of their own family inheritance, to think about the ways in which, increasingly, the complexity of our family stories mean that we all have a stake in the making of multicultural Britain. Thinking more clearly about my grandfather has also allowed me to understand the influence he had on me, despite my never having met him. His commitment to social history and his radical politics have shaped my own interests and worldview in ways I am only now beginning to understand.
The Wolfson Foundation awards grants to a wide variety of museums, historic buildings and landscapes. Do you have a favourite historical place, or a place that inspired you?
When I was a teenager, my late father gave me a copy of the British reggae band Steel Pulse’s first album, Handsworth Revolution (1978). It was my introduction to Handsworth, an inner-city area of Birmingham the other side of town from where I grew up. The two areas are similar, but Handsworth had this political radicalism – in many ways epitomised by the music of Steel Pulse – that put it on a different level. Three years after Handsworth Revolution was released, Handsworth erupted into civil unrest amid issues around deprivation, unemployment and acute racism. Handsworth and its record shops, cricket clubs, fast-food joints, political organisations and reggae musicians eventually became the subject of my first book, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (2019).
Read an extract from Multicultural Britain: A People’s History.
Top images: ‘Multicultural Britain’ book cover; portrait of Kieran Connell (c) Alicia Field
