70 years of migration on show

Daniel Nelson

Courtesy: Migration Museum Project

Image by Photographer Kajal Nisha Patel.

It’s good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It lacks bite, an unusual juxtaposition - a fresh insight, a revealing interpretation, a startling image. It’s worthy rather than arresting.

It is, however, worth seeing, and considering the numbers who pass through the Centre on their way to a performance or another coffee, it may open a few eyes to some of the realities of migrants and migration.

Highlights include a delightful display of items brought by migrants from the homes they left (though only one face is visible on a two-headed doll  – one black, one white – from Sudan); a sitting room in which everything is designed by migrants (and on the table is a ‘Life in the UK’ test with a reminder that Prime Minister David Cameron failed to answer some of the questions on a US TV show in 2012); 3D tours of Harmondsworth Immigration removal centre, the Special Immigration Appeals Court in London and the Inflight Jet Centre at Stansted airport used by the Home Office to deport rejected migrants.

There are images  from the Migration Museum Project’s ‘100 Images of Migration’, a timeline of migrants’ contributions to British life; graphic novels on the Sri Lankan conflict and on the experiences of Somali families in London and Leicester; and a lively wall with quotable facts and figures, such as “More than four times as many Britons obtain unemployment benefit in Germany as Germans do in the UK” and “Net long-term migration to the UK is estimated at 298,000 in the year ending September 2014, up from 210,000 in the previous 12 months” (though there’s no definition of ‘long-term’). The wall facts also say that when national newspapers reported on migration movements the most common words placed in front of the words Romanians and Bulgarians were stop, control and block (in the tabloids) and deter, restrict and dissuade (in the broadsheets).

So, yes, there’s information (though it would be useful to have clear facts about who has come here from where and in what numbers, and how many Brits are living abroad and where); the set pieces are solid (such as the 10,000 Italians recruited for brick factories in Luton and Bedford, and “The Plasterer’s Tale” to illustrate the biggest single migrant group – the Irish); and plenty of visual material. But to start with the Uganda Asians and the recruitment of Caribbean workers is unimaginative, and the “What next?” section is a cop out – forget providing answers: it doesn’t even raise interesting questions. There’s a lack of emphasis, of focus. It’s too safe.

Have migration scares changed over time or are they are a recurrence of the same phenomenon? Why has Britain been so mean accepting Syrian refugees compared with, say, Jewish German children around the time of the Second World War? Is anti-EU feeling the result of immigration fears or is anti- migration rhetoric a way of attacking the EU?  What would be the effect on UK emigrants and immigrants if Britain pulled out of the EU? What about the links between migration and falling native birthrates, and between migration and globalisation?

Such questions are complex, and an exhibition like this can’t tackle everything. But I would have liked a little more ambition. Thank heaven for small mercies, though, and I’m glad it’s here.

·         Adopting Britain: 70 Years of Migration, free, is at the Southbank Centre,  Belvedere Road, SE1, until 6 September. Info: 7960 4200/ www.southbankcentre.co.uk

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