Nassar Ali moved to the UK on the 1st January 1979. ‘I remember looking in the passport and thinking, wow, we moved here on New Years Day’ Like a lot of men of his generation, his father was an economic migrant, who had come to the UK from Bangladesh in the 1960s to earn money ...
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For the last twenty eight years Akin Adekeye has been running the African Arts and African Kitchen restaurant on Drummond Street. He serves up a delicious fusion of West African and Caribbean food for diners who can enjoy his culinary delights and feast their eyes on an impressive display of wooden masks and sculptures from ...
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Séamus Rea was born in 1956, in Northern Ireland. He moved to the King’s Cross area in 1980, and has lived there ever since. Moving to King’s Cross represented an escape from the oppressive atmosphere that he had grown up in, as a young gay man. “It was an amazing, liberating experience to move to ...
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Ursula Troche is a writer, ‘train-informed psychogeographer’, performance poet and life model who has played an active role in the politics of women’s and race equality since moving to London in 1991 from her hometown of Löhne, Germany, in 1991. In a locational interview in the grounds of St. Pancras Old Church, Kings Cross she ...
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To get to the heart of the story of Drummond Street’s Bangladeshi community you have to first take a seat in one of the oldest Bengali restaurants there and soak up its charming atmosphere. The Diwana Bhel-Poori House lies in the middle of the busy street midway between Euston Station and Hampstead Road. It’s been ...
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When increasing numbers of Italian immigrants arrived in the Kings Cross area in the late 19th century they missed the culinary delights of home. Pastas, olive oil, olives and cheeses were in short supply until an astute hardworking local man by the name of Luigi Donatantonio decided to import local produce from his native Italy. ...
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When Shola Alli moved onto Hillview in 1999, it was with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the estate’s refurbishment had just been completed and everything looked shiny and new. On the other, it was still damned by association with King’s Cross, whose own regeneration had not yet begun. “The area was still very much linked ...
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It is a fine winter’s morning when I meet Hillview caretaker Khaled Ali, the sun beaming down from an impossibly blue sky. As we sit down to chat in the courtyard of Whidborne Buildings amid the luxuriant shrubbery it is hard to believe we are a stone’s throw from the Euston Road with its crowds ...
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It isn’t Somers Town Father Philip Dyson grew up in the north of England, and moved to Somers Town in 1980. He spent 15 ½ years there, as the Vicar at St Mary’s Church. A community of “old Cockneys” inhabited the Somers Town that Father Philip remembers. There was no development around either of the ...
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George Eugeniou approaches playwriting as a cycle: it starts on the ground, with his community, where he embeds himself in the lives and struggles of the people around him. He then pours that experience back into the creative melting pot, and makes work that is rooted in the concerns of his time and place. This ...
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