The Immigrants was an oral history project telling the stories of people from all over the world who came to Reading in search of a better life. Led by the Reading Local History Trust, the project brought together Reading’s diverse communities to tell their stories for posterity. The trust secured a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and sponsorship for the project.
BBC Berkshire and Reading Museum Service were also partners in this project. The BBC created a radio drama series around some of the stories, and the oral history recordings are preserved for future generations in the Museum of Reading's oral history archive.
Seventeen volunteers attended an Oral History Interviewer’s Training Day in April 2006 and then started interviewing people from across Reading's diverse community. On 11 November the project book, Routes to Reading, was launched at the Museum. The book focuses 19 stories from the over 35 interviews that are preserved in the project archive at the Museum.
You can find out more and listen to the interviews at the project website www.theimmigrantsproject.org
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Project Gallery
More information and images will appear on the gallery page once the project is underway
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Moving here: people's stories
Reading is a diverse multi-ethnic, multi-racial community and the people who immigrated to the town have helped make Reading the success it is today. Many of the people who settled in Reading after World War II are now in their 50s, 60s, and 70s and have fascinating stories to tell. Stories of how they saved for the boat or plane tickets to come to Britain. How Britain was perceived from the other side of the world and the reality of what they found when they arrived here. Struggles with a new language and culture and trying to find homes, jobs and schools for themselves and for their families. There are stories about human endeavour, human achievement – disasters and triumphs.
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A short history of migration to Reading
In the 19th century people began to move off the land to work in factories, brick kilns and mills that had sprung up in Reading as part of the industrial revolution, initially from rural areas in the south of England. There then followed further immigration from Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as workers sought new opportunities not available to them in more economically depressed areas.
In the 1950s there was the start of large-scale immigration from the Caribbean to work mainly in the hospitals, railways and bus depots. This was followed in the 1960s by immigrants from Pakistan and India and in the 1970s from East African Asians. Reading now has the largest Bajan population outside of Barbados anywhere in the world and is also home to communities from other Caribbean islands such as St. Vincent. There is also a large population of Pakistani and Kashmiri origin as well as smaller Sikh and Hindu communities and significant numbers of people from Bangladesh, Nepal, China, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania.
In common with many large British towns and cities, Reading has also provided refuge for people fleeing religious, political and racial persecutions from across Europe. The town now has established Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian and Spanish communities. More recently refugees have arrived from many of the world's trouble spots including Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Algeria, Libya, Kosovo, Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Reading is also welcoming people from eastern Europe as part of the recent expansion of the European Union.
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