The 'Windrush Front Room' exhibition: Plate collections, plastic pineapples and Jim Reeves
The 'Windrush Front Room' has been created "to celebrate the lives of the Windrush generation", as ITV West Country's Max Walsh reports
An exhibition has opened at a pub in Bristol which aims to transport customers to post-war Britain to see what life was like for the Windrush generation.
The 'Windrush Front Room’ has been set up in the Shakespeare Tavern to mimic how a a Caribbean home in St Pauls or Easton may have looked like in the late 1950s.
Hundreds of thousands of people from the Caribbean travelled to Britain after World War Two to help fill a labour shortage.
HMT Empire Windrush was the most famous boat to arrive with around 1,000 people from the West Indies in 1948.
But in Bristol, often, they were not warmly welcomed - having to overcome racism, housing discrimination and the colour bar.
Exhibition curator Tony Fairweather, whose parents are Jamaican, said the Caribbean front room became a safe place to socialise out of public view.
But it also was a chance for people to show off what they had achieved and purchased after arriving in England with just a suitcase.
Tony said: "I wanted to celebrate the lives of the Windrush generation who came here with just a small suitcase and in ten years had property and a front room which have all their prized possessions."
"It's a part of history of previous generations that's not talked about. It was a safe place in the days where racism was quite rife, and the safest place to be was in your house and to entertain you to take in the front room."
Classic features of the Caribbean front room included a bar with rum and a plastic pineapple, an Axminster carpet, the Blue Spot radiogram playing Nat King Cole and Jim Reeves and a glass cabinet of plates that were never used for eating.
Tony says this exhibition is about celebrating the way Caribbean and British cultures mixed.
He added: "They didn't take none of these objects with them on that ship. They purchased it all in England. It's just the way Caribbean people put it together, reflected their lifestyle and their heritage that made the Caribbean front room something different - the same, but different."
The exhibition is touring a number of Greene King pubs in Bristol, Birmingham and London over the coming weeks.