Research Assistant Testimonies – Mapping Black London

Working on Unforgotten Lives…

Written by: Odile Jordan

This April, the London Metropolitan Archives launched their new exhibition, titled Unforgotten Lives: Rediscovering Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous Heritage, 1560 to 1860. The exhibit has been a big success, in no small part thanks to the lively official launch event, covered here.

*Libby Collard installing a picture frame for the Unforgotten Lives exhibition.* Photo credits: Ellen Valente, 2023.

*The exhibition set-up in progress.* Photo credits: Ellen Valente, 2023.

For the Mapping Black London research assistants, the experience of collaborating on this exhibit was a valuable achievement long before the project went public. It started in Spring 2022, shortly after the presentation of our Ignatius Sancho’s London project, when we had the good fortune to meet up with scholars and the team at the London Metropolitan Archives. Laurence Ward, Claire Titley and Howard Doble invited us to collaborate with them on their new in-house exhibition. They introduced us to their Switching the Lens database, an expansive collection of archival material that mentions people of various ethnic minority backgrounds. These entries, dug out and digitised by a large group of dedicated volunteers, often originate from local parish records and insurance documentation. The dataset was begun in 2002 and has since amassed over 3000 entries. The archivists at the LMA wanted to put this treasure chest of historic data to use – and we were happy to collaborate with them on this.

Over the course of the next year or so, we researched the life stories of notable (and ordinary!) Londoners of colour, organised locational data on the innumerable parish churches within and without the City walls, and constructed a perspective-shifting timeline to provide further context to the research findings displayed in the exhibition.

Below are the undergraduate research assistants’ thoughts on their personal highlights working on the Unforgotten Lives project.

Ellen Valente: After the collective effort and collaboration, being able to take this work and have it in a space like the London Metropolitan Archives – and for a significant period of time, is still mind boggling. Can’t wait for the conversations to continue.

Amouraé Bhola-Chin: Collective memories are embedded within a community’s historical narrative. So, for the exhibition I wanted to direct my focus to the interactions between colonialism, race, and resistance. (Cue the many hours we spent many hours spent scanning archival databases and photographic collections.) Something I soon found during my research trips was that you don’t always find what you’re looking for. Sometimes you find nuts and bolts, and other times you’re left in the wilderness altogether.

I wrote a poem, in response to the wider phenomenon of ‘the archive holding the key’ because when I was reviewing this process, I realised it taught me a lot about myself as a History major and myself as an individual.

Odile Jordan: It’s been such a rewarding and validating experience to help the LMA with their research for this exhibit. I found it especially valuable learning to read into the absences in archival records – to read between the lines of a mainstream perspective to bring to the forefront the experiences of marginalised individuals. I assisted archivist Howard Doble on a newly revised timeline that highlights this difference between the canonical narrative of British history and the inextricable but underrepresented stories of the people of colour who were and still are undeniably part of Britain’s DNA.

Libby Collard: As a research assistant on the project, seeing the stories of individuals we have been researching for over twelve months come to life in the exhibition has been such an exciting and rewarding experience. The opportunity to tell the story of Sake Dean Mohamed was a personal highlight for me. Dean Mohamed wrote the first book ever to be published by an Indian man in English, opened the first ever Indian restaurant in London in 1810 (named the Hindostanee Coffee House) and later became shampooing surgeon to the royal family (George IV and William IV) – a once ‘forgotten’ life whose story is now proudly on display.