The Keskidee Centre: A Home for Black Arts in 1970s London

A place in which culture could happen

The Keskidee Centre brought together activities that are often separated in accounts of cultural history. A person might come for practical advice, a class, a meeting or a performance. Islington Council describes it as Britain’s first dedicated arts centre for the Black community and recognises its continuing importance through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Its history belongs to the making of Black theatre, but also to the everyday work of creating opportunities within a neighbourhood. Culture here included the chance to participate, acquire a skill and discover other people’s work. ¹

Oscar Winston Abrams, a Guyanese-born architect and community organiser, founded the centre in 1971. He had come to London in 1958 and became involved in the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, including local concerns about housing and education. The purchase of a building in Gifford Street, Islington, gave those commitments a physical base. Abrams’s project grew from the conditions facing Caribbean people who were making their lives in Britain. A community organisation could respond to practical difficulties while also providing somewhere for creative ambition to develop. ²

Learning and support under one roof

The centre’s services included legal advice and classes in literacy and typing. Its programme also encompassed cookery, yoga, photography, painting and pottery. That range suggests the breadth of the undertaking. Assistance with a practical problem and access to artistic activity could belong to the same institution, rather than requiring people to find several unfamiliar organisations. The combination also resisted a narrow understanding of what a community needed. People seeking security and opportunity had cultural interests and abilities of their own, and the centre offered ways for these to be developed. ¹

Raising money was part of the work from the beginning. Islington Local History Centre’s exhibition records a benefit performance of No Cottonpickers at the Mermaid Theatre on 1 August 1971. It also identifies support from bodies including the City Parochial Foundation, the Sainsbury Trust and the Pilgrim Trust. Such details make the project more tangible: a programme of classes and events required resources, allies and repeated organising. The existence of a building was an achievement, but sustaining what happened inside it demanded continuing effort beyond the public performances. ³

Making a mission hall useful

Architectural researcher Charlotte Anthony has examined how the former Victorian mission hall was adapted. An early leaflet described two halls, four other substantial rooms and a kitchen. Her comparison of plans, photographs and later records suggests that Abrams inserted upper floors, creating additional usable space. Skylights and a window helped illuminate an upper room which became the library, where Linton Kwesi Johnson worked. These changes mattered because the centre needed rooms for different purposes. A library, a meeting and a performance place different demands on a building; adapting an existing structure allowed those activities to find a shared home. ⁴

A sculptor's presence in the centre

The Nigerian-born artist Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede became an artist in residence at Keskidee during the 1970s. His practice included sculpture in wood and bronze, ceramics and work on paper, drawing on Yoruba cultural knowledge and his training in London. The Ben Uri Research Unit records studies at Willesden and Hammersmith art schools before this period. His presence extended the centre’s creative life beyond the stage. A working artist could make materials, methods and sustained experimentation visible within a place used by people whose main reason for visiting might be something else. ⁵

Jegede’s wider practice also included illustrations and designs connected with Black publishing. His career helps place the centre within a network in which visual art, literature and performance could meet. The importance of an artist in residence cannot be reduced to the display of finished objects. Having someone making work nearby changes the relationship between a community and the processes of art. It allows creativity to appear as an activity undertaken through knowledge and practice, while leaving room for distinctive artistic traditions and individual choices about form. ⁵

Growing up among different sounds

Jegede’s son, the composer Tunde Jegede, grew up around the centre and later described the experience in an interview with the London Mozart Players. His memories bring together reggae, dub poetry and calypso at Keskidee with the classical music he heard through his mother. He recalled an early attraction to the sound of both the cello and the kora. In his account, these interests did not begin as a theoretical exercise in crossing musical boundaries. They were part of the range of sounds available to a child discovering what moved him. ⁶

This recollection reveals a form of learning that a list of classes cannot fully capture. Children can acquire musical knowledge by listening, watching rehearsals and living among people for whom creative work is ordinary. Tunde’s later training and career were his own, and his experience should not be taken as the outcome for every young visitor. It nevertheless gives a clear example of what a cultural centre can make possible: access to different traditions before a child has been told that those traditions must occupy separate worlds. ⁶

Building a theatre company

The theatre became one of Keskidee’s most visible activities. Unfinished Histories identifies the building as the base of a full-time company dedicated to Black theatre, led by the African-American actor and director Rufus Collins. Collins had originally come to Britain while touring with the Living Theatre. His involvement brought experience gained elsewhere into the centre’s developing practice. A resident company could build relationships through repeated work together, giving performers opportunities which an occasional visiting production could not provide in the same way. ⁷

The distinction between a venue and a company matters. A venue offers somewhere to perform; a company must also develop a repertoire, working relationships and ways of making a production. At Keskidee the two could support one another. The physical base gave artistic collaboration some continuity, while the company brought people into the building. This combination helps explain why the centre became important to theatre history even though its original purposes extended well beyond professional performance. ⁷

The local history exhibition records an early production, Lindsay Barrett’s Sighs of a Slave Dream, directed by Pat Murray in 1972. It also recalls work by performers and theatre-makers including Yvonne Brewster, Anton Phillips and Henry Muttoo. In the 1977 production of Say Hallelujah, the audience space was incorporated into a setting of grocery shelves. Such details reveal practical invention: actors, designers and technicians used the available room to shape how spectators encountered a play. The building was a working theatrical resource, with possibilities to be explored. ³

Theatre historian Colin Chambers dates Collins’s leadership to 1976 and describes a more regular programme drawing on Africa, the Caribbean and African America. Productions included Edgar Nkosi White’s Lament for Rastafari in 1977 and Masada in 1978, Steve Carter’s Eden in 1978, Lennox Brown’s The Throne in an Autumn Room in 1979 and Derek Walcott’s Remembrance in 1980. This range challenges the idea that Black theatre represented one setting or style. The centre gave audiences access to different writers and dramatic experiences within a developing repertoire. ⁸

Poetry and a moment of popular visibility

Johnson’s work at the centre included responsibilities for its library and education resources, alongside the development of his poetry. His Voices of the Living and the Dead was staged there. In 1978, another connection brought Keskidee to a much wider audience: Bob Marley filmed the video for Is This Love at the centre, with local children taking part. The young Naomi Campbell appeared among them. These associations are memorable, but they also point back to an existing community setting. The building had a cultural life before a famous musician’s visit made it visible on screen. ²

Keskidee travels to Aotearoa New Zealand

In 1979, members of the theatre group travelled to Aotearoa New Zealand in an exchange organised by Denis O’Reilly. The film record held by NZ On Screen describes a tour extending beyond conventional theatres to marae, prisons and youth centres, as well as Auckland’s Gluepot venue. A marae is a Māori communal meeting place, and performing in such settings placed the visitors within relationships different from those of a standard theatre booking. The encounter connected a London cultural organisation with communities addressing their own histories and aspirations. ⁹

The tour became the subject of the documentary Keskidee Aroha, directed by Merata Mita and Martyn Sanderson. Its institutional description emphasises the meeting of cultural expression and struggles over identity and rights. This makes the visit significant beyond a story of overseas recognition. A company associated with one London building had become part of an exchange whose participants brought different languages, traditions and expectations. To understand that exchange, it is necessary to consider the people receiving the visitors as active participants, with purposes of their own. ⁹

An exchange with difficult questions

Scholar Robbie Shilliam’s study of the tour examines those differences closely. Drawing on interviews and historical records, he describes encounters involving the visiting company and Whakahou, a group of young Māori and Pacific participants. The visitors’ professional discipline could be inspiring, but the exchange also involved tensions over authority, expectations and ways of working. Shilliam resists an account in which a developed Black political culture simply arrives from abroad to instruct local people. Such a story would overlook what the hosts already knew about their own communities and histories. ¹⁰

His analysis also distinguishes the histories involved. Indigenous claims concerning land and colonial dispossession could not be treated as interchangeable with the experiences of African-descended people dispersed through slavery and migration. Connections were possible without making those experiences identical. For some participants, the exchange encouraged a stronger commitment to their own cultural resources. This is a more demanding understanding of international solidarity than a photograph of people performing together. It requires listening, recognising differences and allowing an encounter to change expectations, including the expectation that inspiration must travel in only one direction. ¹⁰

A record made by several people

The New Zealand Film Commission’s record credits Mita and Sanderson as directors, producers and writers of Keskidee Aroha, with Annie Collins as editor and Kevin Hayward responsible for cinematography. Those credits reveal another collective undertaking alongside the tour itself. Preserving an encounter on film required decisions about recording, selection and presentation. The documentary belongs both to Keskidee’s history and to the history of the people who made its travelling company available to later audiences. ¹¹

A film catalogue cannot answer every question about an exchange, and no documentary offers an unmediated account of everything that happened. Its credits nevertheless help identify whose work created the surviving record. Placing that record alongside interviews, programmes and scholarship allows a fuller investigation than treating an overseas tour simply as a triumphant entry in the centre’s history. ¹¹

The difficulty of keeping the doors open

Artistic activity did not guarantee financial security. Chambers records serious debt by 1980, followed by unsuccessful attempts to restore the centre’s position. Its theatrical operation declined, and Abrams eventually sold the building in 1992 to meet debts. These dates caution against imagining an institution that remained equally active throughout its existence. They also show how vulnerable a cultural achievement could be when its material base became unsustainable. A history of celebrated productions and international travel must leave room for the less visible struggle to pay for space and keep an organisation functioning. ⁸

Recovering the life of a lost building

The building later became a church. A serious fire in March 2012 left it beyond repair, and it was demolished. Anthony’s architectural research therefore had to reconstruct its spaces through plans, photographs, archives and memories. She consulted material preserved by the Huntley family, the George Padmore Institute and Islington Local History Centre, as well as recorded interviews. These sources preserve clues about where people gathered and how they used the rooms. They allow the centre to be studied even when the building itself can no longer be visited. ⁴

Keskidee’s importance rests in the relationships made possible within that space. Practical advice, a library, artistic work and opportunities for performance were brought into proximity. Some participants became well known; others appear mainly in memories of classes, meetings or evenings at the theatre. Keeping both within the account gives the centre its proper scale. It was an ambitious cultural institution built through everyday work, and a reminder that the history of Black arts in Britain includes the places where people first acquired confidence, encountered an audience or found someone willing to listen.

Sources

[1] Islington Council. History of sanctuary: section on the Keskidee Centre.

[2] Journey to Justice. Oscar Abrams (1937–1996) and Keskidee Arts Centre.

[3] Islington Local History Centre; PDF hosted by Caledonian ward councillors. The Keskidee: A community that discovered itself, exhibition panels; 2009.

[4] Interior Educators / IE:Studio. Charlotte Anthony, Lost Interiors: An investigation of the Keskidee Centre; 2019.

[5] Ben Uri Research Unit. Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede: artist biography.

[6] London Mozart Players. Celebrating a Croydon icon: interview with Tunde Jegede; 19 October 2025.

[7] Unfinished Histories. Keskidee Centre: venue history.

[8] National Theatre, Black Plays Archive. Colin Chambers, Black British Plays Post World War II–1970s.

[9] NZ On Screen. Keskidee Aroha: documentary description and catalogue record; Undated catalogue entry.

[10] Journal of Historical Sociology; author's accessible PDF. Robbie Shilliam, Keskidee Aroha: Translation on the Colonial Stage, Journal of Historical Sociology 24(1), pp. 80–99; March 2011.

[11] New Zealand Film Commission. Keskidee Aroha: film description and production credits; Undated catalogue entry.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.