Collections

London Metropolitan Archives’ holdings are increasingly coming to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of the capital itself. The wide variety of nationalities living in London has always been an intrinsic part of the core collections held at LMA relating to the government of London; the records of the top tier of London government, including the London County Council, Middlesex County Council and the Greater London Council include committee and subject files relating to ethnic minorities, and the GLC in particular had a very active Ethnic Minorities Committee, with sub-committees covering Ethnic Arts, Anti-Racist Programmes and the Irish Community.

LMA’s parish register holdings have always included references to worshippers of foreign extraction, and although these have hitherto been hidden from all but the dedicated researcher, those from the Black and Asian communities have started to be brought to light by LMA’s Black and Asian Londoners project. LMA has also been involved in The National Archives’ Moving Here project, which involved digitising archival sources which document the movement of members of the Caribbean, South Asian, Irish and Jewish communities to the capital from 1840 to the present day.

However, LMA also holds archive collections created by ethnic communities in their own right. The most important of these are the collections relating to the Anglo-Jewish Community; LMA holds the archives of many of the most influential bodies in Anglo-Jewry today as well as many smaller institutions and organisations which worked in specific areas of London.

Records of other faiths are also represented among LMA’s collections, including Sikhs, French Protestants, Lutherans and Huguenots.

LMA has begun to reach out to the major ethnic communities living in London in the 21st century and it is hoped that forging links in this way will help to encourage groups from those communities to consider depositing their records at LMA. London’s Caribbean community has been the first success story in this respect, and LMA is very proud to have taken in the archives of Eric and Jessica Huntley, prominent members of the community and tireless campaigners for the rights and issues of Black and Caribbean people in London.

Black and Asian Londoners Online archive