Windrush

Stories from the Windrush generation
It all began with a ship called Empire Windrush, which arrived in London on the 22nd of June in 1948, answering a call to rebuild post-war Britain. This year marks the 75th anniversary since that ship docked. Hear the voices of the Windrush generation and descendants, as they share their stories and experience, from biographies to fictional tales.
Product list
    • By: Patrice Lawrence
    • Narrated by: Martina Laird
    • Length: 14 mins
    • Release date: 19-05-22
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 2 ratings
    • family listening | multi-award-winning author
    • This heart-warming and heartfelt story from multi-award-winning author Patrice Lawrence will help ensure that the struggles and achievements of the Windrush generation are never forgotten...

    Regular price: £5.99 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £5.99 or 1 Credit

    • Voices of the Windrush Generation
    • By: Colin Grant
    • Narrated by: Colin Grant, John Sackville, Debra Michaels, Leemore Marrett, Kristin Atherton
    • Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
    • Release date: 03-10-19
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 69 ratings
    • history | draws on firsthand interviews
    • When Colin Grant was growing up in Luton in the 1960s, he learned not to ask his Jamaican parents why they had emigrated to Britain. ‘We’re here because we’re here,’ his father would say. ‘You have some place else to go?’ But now, 70 years after the arrival of ships such as the Windrush, this generation of pioneers are ready to tell their stories...

    Regular price: £12.99 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £12.99 or 1 Credit

    • By: Harris Joshua
    • Narrated by: Lindon Alexander, Donna Berlin, Doreene Blackstock, Lorna Brown, Debra Michaels, Jasmine Stewart, Leo Wringer
    • Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
    • Release date: 28-12-20
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 26 ratings
    • history | five Jamaican women share their story
    • On a misty Monday - 21st June 1948 - the MV Empire Windrush sailed up the Thames and anchored at Tilbury Dock, London. There were a total of 1,027 passengers on board with 802 passengers from British Colonies in the West Indies. Of these individuals, 539 were from Jamaica. The infamous images of the passengers walking down the gangplank the next morning would be the moment the Windrush Generation was born...

    Regular price: £18.99 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £18.99 or 1 Credit

    • By: Floella Benjamin
    • Narrated by: Baroness Floella Benjamin
    • Length: 2 hrs and 32 mins
    • Release date: 09-06-22
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
    • family listening | biography
    • Floella Benjamin was just a young girl when she, her sister and two brothers arrived in England in 1960 to join their parents, whom they had not seen for 15 months. They had left their island home of Trinidad to make a new life in London—part of a whole generation of West Indians who were encouraged to move to Britain and help rebuild the country after the Second World War...

    Regular price: £6.99 or 1 Credit

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    • By: Andrea Levy
    • Narrated by: Andrea Levy
    • Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins
    • Release date: 07-05-15
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 1,132 ratings
    • fiction | award-winning story | BBC adaptation
    • It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn't know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? ...

    Regular price: £10.00 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £10.00 or 1 Credit

    • By: Louise Hare
    • Narrated by: Theo Solomon, Karise Yansen
    • Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
    • Release date: 12-02-20
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 167 ratings
    • fiction | historical murder mystery
    • With the Blitz over and London reeling from war, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England’s call for help. Fresh off the Empire Windrush, he’s taken a tiny room in south London lodgings and has fallen in love with the girl next door. Touring Soho’s music halls by night, pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home – and it’s alive with possibility. Until, one morning, he makes a terrible discovery. As the local community rallies, fingers of blame are pointed at those who had recently been welcomed with open arms...

    Regular price: £13.00 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £13.00 or 1 Credit

  • Regular price: £12.99 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £12.99 or 1 Credit

    • The Soul of a Ship
    • By: Paul Arnott
    • Narrated by: John Telfer
    • Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
    • Release date: 03-06-19
    • Language: English
    • 4 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
    • history | science
    • For three decades the Windrush was the maritime Zelig of the 20th century, playing different roles in the most turbulent years in modern times. Designed in 1930 in the Hamburg boatyard of a Jewish shipbuilder to ferry Germans to a new life in South America, it wasn't long before Goebbels requisitioned her as one of his ‘Strength Through Joy’ vessels. However, her duties soon darkened: she became a Nazi troop carrier, a support vessel for the pocket battleship Tirpitz and a prison ship transporting Jews to Auschwitz...

    Regular price: £11.09 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £11.09 or 1 Credit

    • Exposing the Hostile Environment
    • By: Amelia Gentleman
    • Narrated by: Amelia Gentleman
    • Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
    • Release date: 17-09-19
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 528 ratings
    • history | scandal
    • Paulette Wilson had always assumed she was British. She had spent most of her life in London working as a cook; she even worked in the House of Commons' canteen. How could someone who had lived in England since being a primary school pupil suddenly be classified as an illegal immigrant? It was only through Amelia Gentleman's tenacious investigative and campaigning journalism that it emerged that thousands were in Paulette's position. What united them was that they had all arrived in the UK from the Commonwealth as children in the 1950s and 1960s...

    Regular price: £13.00 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £13.00 or 1 Credit

    • 75 Years of Modern Britain
    • By: Trevor Phillips, Mike Phillips
    • Narrated by: Trevor Phillips, Mike Phillips, Ben Onwukwe, Howard Saddler, Joel Trill, Debra Michaels, Cathy Tyson
    • Length: 20 hrs and 58 mins
    • Release date: 13-07-23
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
    • history | 75th anniversary
    • An oral history of Britain’s first West Indian immigrants and their descendants from 1948 to the present day. In 1948 the former troop ship Windrush made the 30-day journey across the Atlantic from Jamaica. The arrival of its 500 passengers, the first generation of Caribbean migrants in the UK, was the initial step in the formation of a new identity: the black Briton.

    Regular price: £16.99 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: £16.99 or 1 Credit