“Whatever Community Is, This Is Not It”: Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of “Race” in Britain after 1958

The impact of the 1958 Notting Hill riots tends to figure in histories of the political right as a galvanising force for anti-immigrant sentiment - or as radical catalyst in the transnational history of the Black Atlantic. Meanwhile, the generation of black and white social workers and activists who flocked to Notting Hill after the riots have largely been left out of the history of the British left. This article treats Notting Hill after 1958 as an important locale of new progressive thinking and action. It seeks to consider the political work that the idea of 'community' did in Notting Hill, allowing us to consider how the politics of anti-racism relates in complex ways to the reformulation of progressive politics in postwar Britain. It reveals how black activists came to re-appropriate the language of 'community' to critique the ameliorative, welfarist approach to anti-racism. And it unearths the forgotten eclectic beginnings of Britain's New Left. By excavating the history of community work and New Left activism 'from below', this article traces the ways in which a motley group of Methodist ministers, Christian Workers, students, social workers and community leaders tested the limits of liberal paternalism and the 'universalism' of the postwar social democratic state.