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A black-and-white photo of a group of young Black women seated round a table in a youth centre, in conversation with two standing Black men. A small child can be seen on the right.

Between Control and Emancipation: Youth Work with the Second Generation of Post-Colonial Immigrants in 1970s and 1980s London

‘The Fire Next Time’—with this alarming subtitle, the British Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) published a report on ‘youth in multi-racial society’. It stressed that the children of post-colonial migrants from India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean faced disadvantages in education and the labour market. Spending much of their time in public spaces and out of work, these young people had become a focus of public concern. The CRE argued that youth work should play a central role, particularly by engaging ‘Black youth’ in inner-city areas, described as ‘virtually or totally alienated from society’, through supervised leisure programmes aimed at averting unrest.1

In 1970s and 1980s Britain, youth work was often framed as a way to regulate and control the free time of the ‘second generation’ of post-colonial immigrants. So-called ‘unattached’ youth had long been central to youth work. In the immediate post-war years, this primarily concerned integrating the white working-class youth in British cities. But how did theories and practices of youth work with ‘unattached’ young people change in the context of post-colonial migration? Did questions of class recede as ethnicity and race became more prominent in explanations of youth cultures perceived as ‘unattached’ or ‘alienated’? And what role did Black and post-colonial social movements play in influencing youth work with ‘ethnic minorities’, which they often criticized as an expression of a racist British welfare state?

In my PhD project at the University of Cologne, I engage with these questions and examine how debates in youth work intersected with broader questions of diversity, inequality, and the place of second-generation immigrants in Britain’s late twentieth-century cities. I focus on London, often described as a ‘primary site of social and political change in late twentieth century Britain’,2 where the role of youth work in addressing the realities of multi-racial youth in the 1970s and 1980s has received little attention. To address this gap, I conducted archival research in mid 2025, funded by the German Historical Institute, and consulted collections in London (The London Archives, George Padmore Institute, The National Archives, The Women’s Library at the London School of Economics) and archives in Leicester and Birmingham. This blog post presents my initial findings.

How to Integrate?

How best to integrate the second generation of immigrants was a central question in post-war Britain, and answers shifted with changing ideas of diversity and social cohesion. In the 1960s, separate youth clubs for ethnic minorities were seen as a threat to social unity. London’s diverse youth, though mostly born in Britain, were still treated as representatives of foreign cultures. Historical sources—including the work of Felix Fuhg—show that Victorian ideals of civilization and education continued to shape approaches to ‘immigrants’ in youth services.3

From the 1970s onwards, approaches began to shift. Preparing for a multi-racial society involved encouraging Black and Asian teenagers to form communities and contribute to the city’s cultural life. This is reflected in an approach taken by the Clapton Youth Centre in Hackney, whose opening flyer embraced Black youth culture in order to attract a diverse range of young people.

Activities included a steel band, a ‘midnight soul patrol’, and exhibitions on ‘Black peoples’ contribution to world civilisation’ and ‘girls’ subcultures’. The club was attended mainly by Afro-Caribbean youth but also drew young people from white working-class backgrounds. My project asks to what extent the Clapton Youth Centre fostered a ‘diasporan consciousness’ among post-colonial migrants, drawing on Pan-Africanist imaginaries and Black globality.4

Research in cultural studies has emphasized youth culture in migrant and post-colonial communities as a driver of social change capable of transcending racial boundaries. My research builds on this, but goes further: archival sources on London’s youth work reveal how ethnic, racial, class, and gender differences were negotiated, contested, and produced daily within youth centres.

Sports competitions were a key feature of the London Union of Youth Clubs, the city’s largest provider of youth work. But how were social differences negotiated in everyday practice? And did an unassuming, unspectacular form of ‘racial harmony’ exist beneath the heated public discourse of the time? Source: Annual Report of the London Union of Youth Clubs, 1984. p. 7, The London Archives, LMA/4243/D/01/005/02. Courtesy of London Youth.

Youth work addressed not only cultural but also material needs. Afro-Caribbean youth in inner-city London faced high unemployment and homelessness. Community initiatives such as the Dashiki Youth Project, preserved in the Institute of Race Relations Archive, explored how homeless young people—especially from Afro-Caribbean communities—could regain access to housing and work.

Recent studies have emphasized the multicultural inner city as a key site of economic decline within Britain’s deindustrializing landscape.5 My sources show that youth work became part of reform initiatives that aimed to support the poor, multi-racial working class in the racialized ‘Black inner city’. Yet these initiatives were far from conflict-free, as the sources and pictures of the Dashiki Council in London reveal.

From 1972, the Dashiki Council in London, a community organization, provided support and vocational training for mainly homeless and unemployed Afro-Caribbean young people. Besides its philanthropic intentions, the organisation also campaigned against racial inequality and discrimination. The Dashiki Council Annual Report 1973/74, Institute of Race Relations 01-04-04-01-04-02-15-20. All reasonable efforts have been made to contact the copyright holders of this image, without success. If you hold the rights, or know the rights holder, please contact the German Historical Institute London.

A Soft Form of Social Control?

Integration and the creation of a harmonious multi-racial society became central to Britain’s post-war response to immigration from its former colonies in the 1970s. From 1968 onwards, this involved geographically targeted state funding through the Urban Programme, which also supported youth work initiatives. Academic expertise on ‘race relations’ shaped these programmes by identifying ‘disadvantaged communities’, often equating ethnic minority settlement with cultural deficits. Efforts to ensure equal opportunities were not purely philanthropic; fears of social unrest and radical youth subcultures also played a role.6

Criticism of the stigmatizing logic of the ‘race-relations industry’ emerged from Black intellectuals such as Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Stuart Hall.7 Activist and youth worker Gus John likewise denounced deficit-oriented, control-focused approaches to ‘Black youth’. He argued that ‘[t]he state, the police, the media and race relations experts ascribe to young blacks certain objective qualities, e.g. alienated, vicious little criminals, muggers, disenchanted unemployed, unmarried mothers ’.8 For John, youth and social workers in London and other British cities often reinforced these assumptions, curbed political activism by young people, and therefore acted as a soft mechanism of control within the welfare state.

Black-and-white photo of a protest march holding the banner 'Southall Youth Movement remembers Blair Peach and Gurdid Singh Chaggar'. The crowd is flanked by policemen.
Southall Youth Movement protest, 1980. Courtesy of The Monitoring Group.

For Black activists in London’s youth work scene, the alternative was to empower politically determined Black youth to control their own time and resources. London’s Rastafari culture in Brixton and political movements such as the Southall Youth Movement embodied this spirit and developed their own organizational structures.9

London has long been a hub of anti-racist and post-colonial activism, which also influenced the educational landscape through Black supplementary schools, nurseries, and, as I can show in my project, youth work.10 Yet not every organization aligned with Black activism. For instance, the National Association of Indian (later Asian) Youth, founded in Southall in 1971, focused on service provision for ‘young Asians’ rather than promoting a Black political identity.11 Even Asian youth protests in Southall were observed with scepticism, and were framed as leadership issues to be solved by older Asian youth workers.

Were the politics of political Blackness embedded in all youth work initiatives that engaged with the second generation of post-colonial migrants in London? The National Association of Indian Youth is one exception. Youth Service Information Centre, Implications of Youth Work in Asian Community: Report of a Conference Organised by National Association of Indian Youth (Leicester, 1973). Courtesy of National Youth Agency.

Municipal Anti-Racism and the Youth Service

In the 1980s, London underwent rapid change, and race relations became central to national debates. Tensions long highlighted by the CRE erupted in May 1981, when violent clashes between mostly Afro-Caribbean youths and police in Brixton dominated the press. The ‘Brixton riots’ were seen as more than just an outbreak of urban unrest, sparking debates about the place of post-colonial migrants in British society. The press, police, and Thatcher’s New Right framed the violence as a threat to British values, demanding strict law-and-order responses.

London’s politicians, however, took a different approach. Labour left-winger Ken Livingstone, leading the Greater London Council (GLC) after the riots, prioritized social inequality and racial justice under what came to be called ‘municipal anti-racism’. Youth work formed part of this vision. The GLC funded numerous Black community groups for youth work, especially in Brixton, and the Inner London Education Authority aimed to root out racism from schools and the youth service. Amidst this political environment, The London Union of Youth Clubs (LUYC) launched a ‘senior member training course on racial awareness’ in 1983, encouraging participants to ‘look at our own situation, our feelings and attitudes towards more understanding and positive action in our lives both within the club and wider community.’12

Little more than a symbolic remedy for entrenched material inequalities? The London Union of Youth Clubs organized senior membership training on ‘racial awareness’ from 11 to 13 November 1983. The London Archives, LMA/4232/A/19/007. Courtesy of London Youth.

Contemporary Black intellectuals like Paul Gilroy famously exposed the superficial, largely symbolic nature of ‘municipal anti-racism’ in London.13 Does his critique also apply to the LUYC’s programmes? On what knowledge of ‘racism’ did the experts rely in their annual training programmes, and to what extent did these initiatives change the pedagogical practices of many youth centres in London during the 1980s? These are questions I will address as my research project develops.

Conclusion and Further Research

By focusing on the ‘long 1980s’, my project examines a pivotal period in post-Empire Britain. Rather than only writing a history of resistance and anti-racist protest, it also highlights the complex debates over leisure programmes and knowledge about Black or ethnic minority youth in London’s inner cities. Youth work reveals heterogeneous developments and diverse projects of ‘de-colonizing’ practice.

My dissertation goes beyond London and even Britain, adopting a Western European perspective on national and urban responses to post-war immigration. The often-cited ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ that gained prominence from the 1970s was frequently framed around the position and future of second-generation migrants. This is also the case for West Germany, which I use as a comparative example. The second generation of labour migrants (Gastarbeiter*innen) became central to debates on diversity, educational and social inequality, and belonging. Using Munich as a case study, I examine how urban policy represented ‘foreign’ youth (Ausländerkinder) as an integration problem. What youth and community programmes were implemented to address their needs; and what role did scientific knowledge and social movements play in shaping these programmes? Answering these questions, and comparing them with the findings from my archival research in Britain, will offer new insights into Western European responses to post-war migration.


Feature image: Black girls’ group in Coventry. Source: Gus John and Nigel Parkers, Working with Black Youth: Complementary or Competing Perspectives? (Leicester, 1984), 3. Courtesy of Diana Fallowes, Jeanette Murphy, and National Youth Agency.

  1. Commission for Racial Equality, Youth in Multi-Racial Society: The Urgent Need for New Policies. ‘The Fire Next Time’ (London, 1980), 11. []
  2. Stephen Brooke, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City (Oxford, 2024), 9. []
  3. Department of Education and Science, Immigrants and the Youth Service: Report of a Committee of the Youth Service Council (London, 1967), 2, 47. For a broader academic contextualization see Felix Fuhg, London’s Working-Class Youth and the Making of Post-Victorian Britain, 1958–1971 (Cham, 2021), 377–83. []
  4. Opening flyer of the Clapton Youth Centre in Hackney, 1979. The London Archives: LMA/4550/03/01/002; Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (Oakland, CA, 2019), 5; Rob Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 (Oakland, CA, 2018). []
  5. Marc Matera et al., ‘Marking Race: Empire, Social Democracy, Deindustrialization’, Twentieth Century British History, 34/3 (2023), 552–79. []
  6. Reet Tamme, Wissenschaft und ‘race relations’: Repräsentation von Multiethnizität in Großbritannien 1950–1980 (Berlin, 2022), 222. []
  7. Almuth Ebke, ‘From “Ethnic Community” to “Black Community”: The Cultural Belonging of Migrants between Race-Relations Research and the Politics of Blackness in 1970s and 1980s Britain’, German Historical Institute Washington Bulletin Supplement 15 (2020), 103–8. []
  8. Gus John, In the Service of Black Youth: A Study of the Political Culture of Youth and Community Work with Black People in English Cities (Leicester, 1983), 155. []
  9. Aaj Kaal: A Community Youth Magazine Produced in Southall by the Asian Youth Movement, in Institute of Race Relations 01-04-04-01-12-027. For broader contextualization see Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London, 2013). []
  10. Kevin Myers, Struggles for a Past: Irish and Afro-Caribbean Histories in England, 1951–2000 (Manchester, 2015). []
  11. Youth Service Information Centre, Implications of Youth Work in Asian Community. []
  12. London Union of Youth Clubs (1983): Senior Member Training: Racial Awareness, in The London Archives, LMA/4232/A/19/007 (from the London Union of Youth Clubs collection). []
  13. Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago, 1987), 150. []

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Max Schellbach (April 20, 2026). Between Control and Emancipation: Youth Work with the Second Generation of Post-Colonial Immigrants in 1970s and 1980s London. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved May 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/163fk


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