The Black House

First edition of The Black House by Colin Jones (2006)

First impression 

Large format hardback in as new condition

Published by Prestel

About

“Could you do something on mugging?” the Sunday Times editor asked Jones and journalist Peter Gillman in 1973. It was a time when the British press had seized on the issue of “mugging” as a means of stirring up moral panic over Black criminality, in turn creating a distraction from the crisis of capitalism.

Jones and Gillman decided to focus their story on a hostel located at 571 Holloway Road. The brainchild of dynamic Caribbean migrant Herman Edwards, it served as a halfway house for vulnerable, disenfranchised Afro-Caribbean teens. Some had been thrown out by their families, while many had left school with no qualifications, finding themselves drifting in and out of the criminal-justice system. The refuge was officially called “Harambee” (Swahili for “pulling together”). But those who frequented it knew the place, rather contentiously, as “the Black House”.