Marginalised No More Project

The ‘Marginalised No More’ project was conceived by the Bernie Grant Trust to enable young Londoners to understand the legacy of a generation which in the 1980’s demanded and struggled for its place in British Society. Using the Bernie Grant Archive, this project enabled individuals to engage with and learn from this legacy. Focusing on the eventful years of 1983-1993 in London, the project explored this critical decade in Britain’s journey to becoming an inclusive society.

The project was built around four main themes: ‘Marginalised Black Britain’; ‘Black Britain: Marginalised no more’; ‘The Role of Leadership’; and ‘Black Britain: 25 years on’. With these themes at its core, through use of the archive and the example of Haringey, the project explored the social and economic conditions and pressures that helped to shape Black British identity at the time, the responses to those pressures, and the impact that these actions had not only on the Black British Community but also on the wider society.

The project as a whole included three strands: Developing Schools Resources; Developing Young Producers and Bringing Stories Alive, and Training Heritage Ambassadors. This particular collection contains the interviews that were carried out by the Heritage Ambassadors as part of the third strand of the project. The interviews focus primarily on one or more of the four main themes that the project was built around.

The Marginalised No More Project trained 12 young people in heritage and oral history skills, and recorded interviews with 81 individuals. The full collection of interviews are available at Bishopsgate Institute upon request with the Archivist, however a selection of excerpts and transcripts of some of the interviews will be made available here soon, as part of the Bernie Grant Trust Digitisation Project.