Windrush generation

This year marks the 70th anniversary since the Windrush docked at Tilbury [Dan Kitwood/Getty Images]

This year marks the 70th anniversary since the MS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing with it 492 men and women from the West Indies who became the first of the symbolic Windrush generation.

They arrived on British shores at the request of the government, to redress severe labour shortages after World War II.

Yet for the new arrivals who walked along the gangplank of the ship onto the shores of their new home, their arrival was not without hostility.

Openly anti-immigration political campaigns were forged with slogans such as, "No Irish, no blacks, no dogs", culminating in Enoch Powell’s "Rivers of Blood" speech delivered in 1968, which became known as one of the most incendiary anti-immigration speeches in modern times.

For the children of the Windrush generation, that hostility has come full circle.

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