First edition of The Black House by Colin Jones (2006)
First impression
Large format hardback in as new condition
Published by Prestel
About
Could you do something on mugging? theSunday Timeseditor asked Jones and journalist Peter Gillman in 1973. It was a time when the British press had seized on the issue of mugging as a means of stirring up moral panic over Black criminality, in turn creating a distraction from the crisis of capitalism.
Jones and Gillman decided to focus their story on a hostel located at 571 Holloway Road. The brainchild of dynamic Caribbean migrant Herman Edwards, it served as a halfway house for vulnerable, disenfranchised Afro-Caribbean teens. Some had been thrown out by their families, while many had left school with no qualifications, finding themselves drifting in and out of the criminal-justice system. The refuge was officially called Harambee (Swahili for pulling together). But those who frequented it knew the place, rather contentiously, as the Black House.
