Set in the heart of the East End, the museum building itself is steeped in the rich British history of immigration - having once been home to a Huguenot silk merchant from the early 1700s, and concealing a rare Victorian synagogue from 1869. Today it chronicles the movement of French Huguenots, Irish, Bengalis and Somalis into the area and challenges each of us to consider our own immigrant ancestry: one of the exhibits, for example, features a mirrored suitcase, the inscription of which invites us to look at ourselves: "All of us are immigrants or descended from immigrants, it just depends how far back you look".
While I was there today, on one of the museum's rare openings to the public (just 10 a year because of the poor structural state of the building), I overheard a museum guide enquiring about a young man's own ancestry and him replying "Oh, I'm just French", to which the guide responded: "That doesn't mean you don't have an immigrant history!"
All the stories told here are of people fleeing political turmoil, famine or poverty. But many people moved here simply because they wanted to. My father left India for a variety of non-urgent reasons: for a sense of adventure, to make a better financial life for himself, to study.
He left a steaming Cochin harbour in 1960 with a newly-minted degree in his pocket and spent 17 and a half days on a boat to Milan. He travelled to Germany by train and had his first experience of snow, which excited him but intensified his homesickness for sunshine and heat. Even though he didn't know any German, he found a job as a manager's assistant and stayed for 6 months, saving money to fulfill his dream of crossing the Channel to England.
Arriving in Victoria Station, London, he asked a friendly, 6 foot tall British bobby for help finding a room. The policeman directed him to an Indian-owned house - a very rare thing in those days - in Belsize Park and my father shared a room with 3 or 4 other newly-arrived Indian men. After a few weeks he started yearning for more private lodgings. Eagerly scanning the newsagents' windows, he came across lots of little, handwritten cards advertising rooms for rent, but all of them had "Sorry, no coloureds, no blacks" scrawled over them. But he persevered and eventually found a room, with a landlady who was so suspicious of him she said he could have the room on the condition that he cooked no curries there and that she had the right to give him 1 day's notice. He stayed there 3 and a half years.
There were so few brown people in north London at the time that to meet other Indians he would simply approach them on the street. Slowly he began making friends and they regularly met up for long walks in Hyde Park and on Hampstead Heath. Many of these remained friends long after I was born, years later. It's a habit he hasn't lost. When my parents visited me in South Dakota, USA, a few years ago, we saw what seemed like the state's only "real Indian", in my local supermarket. My father immediately went up to this man and started chatting. We met his wife and had several dinners together - all within the 3 weeks my parents were in the States.
Anyway, my father eventually got a job as an accounts assistant at the BBC, and when it came time to move in to his own flat, his once-suspicious landlady asked if any of his Indian friends wanted to rent the room!
By the time my mother arrived in 1968, he was well-established in London and she simply fit into his network of friends - a much easier experience, although she has her own immigrant story to tell and I'll save that for another time.
Related link:
+ Never ending story: John Cunningham on the tangled past and present of a museum of immigration (The Guardian)
Other links today:
+ A great panoramic shot of Brooklyn and Manhattan by photoblogger Joseph Holmes - be sure to check out the rest of the photoblog too.
+ My favourite NYC photoblogger at the moment
