Windrush Square

The square takes its name from HMT Empire Windrush, which brought hundreds of Caribbean passengers to Britain in 1948. The renaming came in 1998, marking the ship's 50th anniversary, and was meant to fix Brixton's long association with the Windrush generation onto its central open space.

The square itself was formed by joining the older Tate Library Gardens with a separate space already known as Windrush Square, laid out in the 1990s, closing the stretch of Rushcroft Road that had divided them.

The ground changed use more than once before it became a square at all. A motor coach garage, run by Orange Luxury Coaches, was built here in 1927 between what is now Rushcroft Road and Saltoun Road; a 1933 banner advertised "trips daily to all seaside resorts". A small Esso petrol station stood beside it. By 1980 the garage had been adapted for tyre and exhaust fitting, a cane furniture shop and small business units.

During the 1990s Brixton Challenge regeneration programme, the old garage was demolished and the site, later extended over the petrol station and a pub car park, was laid out as public open space. A further refurbishment in 2010, led by Transport for London with Lambeth Council as part of the Mayor's Great Outdoors Programme, linked this space to the adjoining Tate Library Gardens with a new water feature, 21 trees, improved lighting and a granite seat. The square reopened in its present combined form in 2011.

The Black Cultural Archives, housed in the listed Raleigh Hall at No. 1, has become the square's cultural anchor since opening in 2014. Its exhibitions have included "Black Women in Britain", featuring the singer Adelaide Hall, and "Expectations", a 2018 show of Neil Kenlock's photography of the British Black Panthers. A bust of Garrison stands there.

Beyond the archive, two "Art in Brixton" fairs have been held on the square, and a mural unveiled at Brixton Underground station in 2025 by the artist Rudy Loewe depicts people and places of Brixton including Windrush Square. The Brixton Immortals Domino Club has held tournaments here since at least the 1980s.

Sir Henry Tate made his fortune in sugar, taking control of John Wright & Co. by 1869 and renaming it Henry Tate & Sons after patenting a machine for making sugar cubes. He donated three libraries to Lambeth, one of which stood on the site now inside Windrush Square, and in 1889 gave his 65-painting collection and £80,000 toward the gallery that opened as the National Gallery of British Art in 1897. His widow, Dame Amy Tate, bought the land in front of the library in 1904 and opened it as a public garden the following year, with a bronze bust of her husband at its centre.

More than a century later, Len Garrison, who co-founded the Black Cultural Archives, was commemorated with a bust unveiled at the archive's new Windrush Square home in 2014.

The square has kept adding memorials into the 2020s. The Cherry Groce Memorial Pavilion, designed by David Adjaye, was erected in 2021. Since November 2017 the Nubian Jak Community Trust has run an annual Remembrance Sunday ceremony here, with a military parade, African drumming and libation, in honour of African and Caribbean war dead.

The square's symbolic weight has also shaped debate elsewhere: Arthur Torrington of the Windrush Foundation argued the National Windrush Monument should be sited in Windrush Square rather than Waterloo station, as more relevant to the Windrush generation.

Windrush Square now sits at the heart of an area with a strong African and Caribbean connection. The milestone that once stood by Brixton's Town Hall survives here too, a smaller relic among the larger memorials. Garages, a library garden and a naming decision made fifty years after a ship's arrival have all left their mark on the same patch of ground.