ABSTRACT

In 1964 Pearl J ephcott, in a study of N otting Hill in London, wrote of a West Indian woman:

She has furnished [her room] by the most lush of Edwardian tastes. But the (cracked) window with skinny, dirty curtains is never cleaned, while the "front" on to which the room looks and for which she is one of the people responsible, is a shambles. . . Considering the primitive conditions to which some, if a minority of West Indians have been accustomed - the poverty and yaws of certain of the rural areas of Jamaica, or the mud and mosquito-ridden villages of much of the coastal plain of British Guiana - they have adapted themselves remarkably well to city life. 1

Jephcott called the lives she found in Notting Hill "anachronistic" by comparison with "the pride of possession, the 'nice home' that is a characteristic of the working-class family of today". Among the anachronisms she identified were large families, which she saw as an indication of the "survival of bye gone patterns" and basement homes where the health visitor's comment was: "a terrible place for a baby".