Look Out For These Billboards Celebrating London's Caribbean Cultural Heritage

Will Noble
By Will Noble Last edited 25 months ago
Look Out For These Billboards Celebrating London's Caribbean Cultural Heritage
A woman walks past a billboard that says: open mics and encouraging words happened here
40 markets, cinemas, clubs, restaurants, libraries and community centres feature in the pop-up campaign. Image: Tate/Jack Arts

Look out for billboards, posters and vinyl floor stickers celebrating places connected to London's Caribbean cultural heritage.

40 markets, cinemas, clubs, restaurants, libraries and community centres feature in a pop-up campaign, with written testimony from cultural figures with Caribbean heritage who call the UK home. The Tate/Jack Arts project is an extension of/promo for Tate's current exhibition, Life Between Islands: Caribbean British art 1950s, which stars art from the likes of Caribbean artists Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke and Horace Ové.

Steve McQueen's words appear outside Hammersmith's Macbeth Centre. Image: Tate/Jack Arts

Among the unique posters scattered about town — from Notting Hill to Deptford and Stoke Newington to Brixton — is one featuring the words of Sir Steve McQueen, explaining why Saturday School trips to the Macbeth Centre in Hammersmith were so important to him as a child.

Says McQueen on the poster, titled 'Education and Community Happened Here': "This spot marked the place I attended Saturday school at five years old. For me, it was a space in which I felt a sense of pride and community within what was otherwise a hostile environment. It was, in many ways, the making of me and many others I am sure of it."

One of the posters up in the window of Cummin Up in New Cross. Image: Tate/Jack Arts

Fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner chooses the Stuart Hall Library in Pimlico as her special location, citing in the poster how the library's Iniva archive has been central to her work.

Photographer Dennis Morris, meanwhile, has a poster on Margaret Street, W1, at the old site of the Speakeasy Club. It's here that he met Bob Marley for the first time. Recalls Morris: "As he approached, I asked him, could I take his picture. 'Yeah, mon!' he replied, 'Com' in'". For whatever reason, Bob took to me and after the soundcheck, he invited me to come on the tour. The rest is history.

A train rattles over a bridge on which is a billboard for the Tate exhibition
The posters are in situ till March. Image: Tate/Jack Arts

Other locations that feature their own unique messages include Cummin Up Caribbean takeaway shop in New Cross; the Ritzy cinema in Brixton; The Distillery in Notting Hill; New Beacon Books in Clapton and Crystal Palace Farm. You can download a map of all the locations on Tate's website. The outdoor exhibition runs till 6 March.

Last Updated 25 February 2022

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