17 October, 2017
I came here to learn English. I was going to go back in a couple of years but I never did. I did some travelling, I lived in Japan for a year, I was here for about five years when I thought I’ve got a degree in chemistry, and here I was working in bars and pubs and thought this is not something I want to carry on doing. I was interested in textiles but I never really thought that was something I could do for a living. In the Czech Republic when you study art it’s more like a hobby than a profession. I applied to Central St Martins for a fashion print course.
Home is here. I have lots of friends, I work here, I have my husband so have my family. I feel I’ve been living here for so long that my life is here rather than back home. When I go back to Czech I see family – just a few close friends, but I don’t really get to meet new people. It would be nice to have like a summerhouse there but having family I can do that anyway, I don’t think I’d want to live there, maybe I’ll change my mind.
19 July, 2017
A young Asian women seemingly unaware of a close quarter English Defence League protester during the EDL’s Luton ‘home’ protest arch.
19 July, 2017
The photograph was taken at a central London hotel, where Fatima Seroukh was working as a chambermaid. She came to this country from Tangiers in 1978. At the time most of the service and hospitality industry in the UK was in need of recruiting foreign labour to fill its workforce. Morocco, Spain, Portugal and the Philippines supplied such labour and most of the workers recruited were single women, who left their families behind in their home countries. Alone in a new country these women came to see their fellow workers as a new family, encouraging a strong feeling of sisterhood.
This image, of migrant workers, working in a London hotel in the 1970s, is part of a series of pictures produced to accompany an oral history project produced by the Al Hasaniya Moroccan Women’s Centre London 2010–11. The project documented the personal migratory stories of Moroccan women who came to the UK between 1960 and 1990 and settled in the Portobello area of London.
