I don’t know where she is and where she came from

EDL protest, Luton, February 2011

A young Asian women seemingly unaware of a close quarter English Defence League protester during the EDL’s Luton ‘home’ protest arch.

Fatima Seroukh, 1979

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.

Chinese children learning English in the school holidays, Liverpool, August 1971

Linda Dawsing teaches the sons and daughters of Chinese families recently arrived to live on Merseyside: ‘Only four weeks ago, the 60 youngsters knew hardly a word of English. But now, after going on the specially devised crash course, they can all chatter away in English. The children, aged between 6 and 16, now know enough English to understand and be understood in their new life, and have lost their shyness and reserve.’