Mapping the Notting Hill Riots: Racism and the Streets of Post-war Britain

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of the 1958 race riots in west London. It uses arrest data to map where the violence occurred and where the rioters lived. Few of the white people arrested lived alongside black people or competed with them for housing. The riots were not a straightforward response to privation. Rather, they were a reassertion of an implicitly but powerfully racialized conception of urban community in which street life was symbolically potent. Anti-immigration politicians would exploit the idea of familiar streets ‘lost’ to demographic change, beginning with Oswald Mosley the year after the riots.