New archive to explore the legacy of ’Windrush Cricket’

A new digital archive compiling the oral histories of Windrush Generation cricket players from the Caribbean is being developed by a UCL researcher, who is planning workshops across the country to collect stories and shape the website to meet the community's needs. Dr Michael Collins (UCL History) has been gathering numerous oral histories as part of his Windrush Cricket Project at UCL since 2020. He plans to publish some of these within his forthcoming book, Windrush Cricket: Caribbean migration and the remaking of post-war England . Dr Collins said: "A single book can only incorporate a fraction of the histories of migration and settlement in which cricket and cricket clubs were a very significant and arguably under-recognised element of postwar black British history. There are so many more stories out there." The Caribbean Cricket Archive will be a free-to-use, interactive online collection of oral histories, known as a "memory map." The online archive will be built by UCL experts in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) within the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. The website will provide a space for communities, clubs and individuals to share their stories in their own words. The aim is to widen public understanding and awareness of the history of Caribbean history in the UK, to make the legacy of Caribbean cricket more meaningful and accessible to today's generation and inspire greater participation in cricket among young people.