In September of 2023, I was in London for a few days.

While I was there, I visited Brixton, a neighborhood in South London.

Brixton is London's Caribbean epicenter.

You can find all types of Caribbean foods and there's also boutique

selling books, clothes and art that come from the Caribbean. What you're

hearing is what I heard when I came out of the London Underground.

There was this guy playing Steelpan, an instrument from Trinidad and Tobago, right at the

entrance.

It's a massive sensory overload.

This is Dr Aisha Johnston Johnston who grew up nearby.

As you probably felt when you came up from the tube station,

and there's a man playing the steel pan,

then there's usually somebody preaching,

then there'll be someone else preaching something else,

someone selling incense.

It reminded me a lot of parts of Brooklyn and Harlem,

but the place I came to see is a lot less colorful than the neighborhood that surrounds it,

at least on the surface, and it's a few short blocks away from the subway station.

After a couple minutes, I got to the tan-colored building that is the Black Cultural Archives,

three stories tall and from the 1800s. This is a place dedicated to collecting, preserving,

and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in the UK. But unfortunately,

when I got there, it was closed.

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