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UCL History's Dr Michael Collins Awarded AHRC Knowledge Exchange Grant for Black Cricket UK Archive

9 October 2023

Dr Michael Collins (UCL History) has been awarded an AHRC Knowledge Exchange grant worth £20,000 to build an online community archive – Black Cricket UK – which will chart the history of the hundreds of post-war black cricket clubs formed across Britain.

Black and white image of game of cricket being played in Trinidad in 1960

The archive will begin with the Leeds Caribbean Club, 1948. Typically styled as Caribbean ‘sports and social clubs’ – organising and playing football through the winters and cricket in the summers – these clubs were central to processes of migration and settlement in ways that have been largely ignored by historians of black Britain. The clubs performed a range of social functions well beyond sport, creating support networks and regulating patterns of interaction with the existing white population, as well as other immigrant communities. UCL History welcomes back former MA student Montaz Marché as the lead researcher. Montaz has recently pioneered the initiative with Dr Leah Lovett and other colleagues at The Bartlett’s programme. Black Cricket UK will become an early component of this much bigger online resource. As a knowledge exchange project, Black Cricket UK involves several collaborations. Michael and Montaz will work with UCL’s Centre for Spatial Analysis (CASA) to produce the interactive “Memory Maps”, which provide the online space for black cricket clubs to chart and document their own histories. The external partners are the (ACCA) and the African Caribbean Engagement (ACE) programme, led by social entrepreneur and former England women’s cricketer Ebony Rainford-Brent. Working through ACCA and ACE, Montaz will lead a series of oral history workshops around the UK, drawing on oral history and memory studies expertise within UCL East’s Urban Room, and providing local communities with the skills and knowledge they need to document their own pasts. Black Cricket UK grows out of Michael’s Windrush Cricket Project, which will be published as a book by OUP in 2024, and his recent work with the (ICEC).