Make yourself at home: the interiors of the diaspora

“The front room is a theatre of desires — the sacred space in which the family performs rituals of hospitality for the outside world,” says the artist Michael McMillan. That may be the case, but we rarely get to see inside the living spaces of people who are in some way different to ourselves, which is what makes them fascinating — the homes of the rich and famous in magazines, the slivers of life glimpsed between open curtains or the tantalising frame around a colleague during a video call.

A person’s front room, we imagine, is an insight into who they truly are. But the front room can also be just that: a front — curated to convey exactly what we want to say about ourselves.

For years now, McMillan has been opening up a version of the living room he remembers from his childhood in the 1970s — the one that belonged to his parents, who moved to Britain from St Vincent and the Grenadines. Through installations exhibited in museums and his book, The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, reissued in April, he has prised open a door to his own private domestic experience.

The reissuing of his book coincides with a series of projects that celebrate the everyday experiences of diasporic communities, in a year that marks the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush. The ship carried almost 500 people from the Caribbean to Tilbury in Essex, and is often described as the symbolic beginning of multicultural Britain.

The revised edition includes new reflections — on the front room in post-apartheid South Africa, for example — as well as contributions from poet Dorothea Smartt and artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, alongside the original explorations of British-Caribbean homes in the postwar era. Evocative archive photographs and spotlights on objects such as the radiogram and drinks trolley depict a home life that was vibrant and dynamic — a space where their residents could socialise and be themselves, when they might not have felt welcome in public social spaces.

McMillan’s recreated room installations pull all these elements together. “There is colourful, patterned wallpaper that doesn’t quite match the carpets,” he says. “There’s crocheted pieces and artworks, including portraits of Black icons and other objects that remind you of your heritage. There are glass cabinets that display family heirlooms or items with sentimental value. It’s also a very aspirational space: there are gadgets, books and certificates.” The space simultaneously embodies a sense of continuity and transition — the construction of a new visual identity, drawing on both the past and future.

McMillan says his installations have always resonated with audiences beyond the British-Caribbean community, or even diasporic people in general. But why shine a light on this subject at all? “It’s important because immigrant communities are often represented as walking the streets doing nothing of value — as if we don’t have any homes.”

It’s important because immigrant communities are often represented as walking the streets doing nothing of value — as if we don’t have any homes

At a moment of housing insecurity and fractured debate over heritage and identity, perhaps reflecting on how people can claim space for themselves and feel a sense of belonging is becoming increasingly important.

The architect Shahed Saleem, whose projects have included mosques and community centres, says that while there clearly isn’t a particular aesthetic that cuts across the homes of people who have migrated to Britain, he has noticed some common approaches.

“In my own childhood home, there was a framed photograph of the world taken from space and one of a rose next to it, and there was lighting and furniture that didn’t quite go together,” he recalls of the living room of his Indian-origin family. “We didn’t have the conventional cultural registers one might use to decide what to put together — it was more about what people enjoyed,” he says.

Denise Noble, a cultural sociologist who has written extensively about the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, believes efforts to explore such interiors are particularly meaningful to people for whom these artefacts and spaces are significant — their owners and their children. “It elevates unremarkable objects we often take for granted and don’t talk about, unless in such derisory terms as kitsch . . . into something to be taken seriously,” she says.

The homes of second-generation migrants may look nothing like those of their parents, shaped as they are by external cultural influences. The curator Rose Sinclair was conscious of this kind of loss when she started asking her mother, who was a professional dressmaker before coming to Britain from Jamaica, how she learnt to crochet.

“In my collection, I have an unfinished piece of pink crochet she started while she was travelling to England,” she says. “Many women had amazing textile skills, but weren’t able to continue those as professionals here.” But when she started conversations about this, “a lot of older women would say: ‘Who’s interested in our story; what’s the value in this?’ The value,” she continues, “is that it allows us to trace why you are the way you are. And, if we don’t ask these people about their lives, these stories get lost.”

Today, her research focuses on how Black women in Britain used fabrics to decorate their spaces and connect with others — ideas she’s exploring in an installation in Birmingham, opening over the summer to commemorate the arrival of the Windrush. In the home, Sinclair says, the use of handmade textiles was “about creating a safe space: one you were proud to bring people back to”.

Montserrat-born Turner Prize-winning artist Veronica Ryan’s early domestic experiences have also informed her current work, which often incorporates crochet as a structural element. “As a child, I was fascinated by the way my mother and my aunt would crochet doilies and put objects — vases and ornaments — in the middle, in a way that looked very sculptural in its presentation and intention,” she says. Her interest in recontextualising debris also draws from her family’s approach to materials. “My parents always recycled the things around us, so the way we reuse waste has been part of the tradition I’ve grown up with,” she says.

That question of how aesthetic traditions are passed on becomes more acute when you consider that, in London at least, permanent housing, and therefore the front room itself, is an increasing rarity. Many people migrating to Britain are likely to live in short-term, privately rented flat-shares. Someone arriving as a refugee might lodge in another family’s home, while a person travelling to the UK for seasonal work might only be able to lay claim to a bed in a shared caravan. Precarious housing is also the reality for countless people moving within the city and the country. Against that backdrop, the question of how people make a home is pertinent to increasing numbers.

“There are almost two front rooms: the one of the imagination and the reality today,” says Sonia Solicari, director of the Museum of the Home in east London, which hosts a permanent iteration of McMillan’s 1970s front room. “Homes have been changing for some time — fewer people in built-up urban areas have a living room that’s separate from others.”

Fewer people in built-up urban areas have a living room that’s separate from others

Across the UK, living spaces and kitchens have been knocked together and front rooms turned into bedrooms. Less tangible forces are also changing how we use interiors — financial challenges creating more multigenerational households and the proliferation of handheld devices pushing the focus away from the television.

The interior space that architect Nana Biamah-Ofosu co-designed last year with colleague Bushra Mohamed for the William Morris Gallery in north London — as part of an exhibition about the groundbreaking 1960s textile designer Althea McNish, curated by Sinclair — addressed this notion of change.

Her design responded to McNish’s concept of the “Bachelor Girl’s Room”, a studio-like space she designed for a single creative woman, and reflects on how it might be updated for today. The resident of this room is a person of multiple origins, whose environment reflects her history and identity, through books and other ephemera. Conscious of the limited space a person might have to express themselves, the new design also uses furniture, fabric and colour to create divisions.

“Most young people in London will not have such a thing as a front room — everything happens in your bedroom, where you might only be for a year,” she says.

Biamah-Ofosu moved to the UK with her family from Ghana in the 2000s and says that, for her parents, their house was in some ways a symbol of planting roots. “And for my generation the idea of home is about continuing a feeling of belonging here. I might go elsewhere, but this city also belongs to me — I own a part of it,” she says.

The tension between permanence and instability has been explored extensively by journalist Kieran Yates, who by the age of 25 had lived in 20 different houses. “One of the things I’ve kept with me throughout is a fake plastic gold tissue box: my grandparents had the same kind of thing and its history traces back to real gold versions made during the Mughal empire,” she says.

Through interviews with marginalised tenants across the country, her book All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In explores how people construct home amid continual precarity and movement. “How we build our interiors is tied up to the idea of security,” she says.

Feeling at home doesn’t need to equate to home ownership but it does require more than what’s on offer to 17.5mn people in the UK who live in overcrowded, dangerous, unstable or unaffordable housing. And it’s racialised. “Black people are 70 per cent more likely to be impacted by the housing emergency than white people; south Asian people are 50 per cent more likely,” she says, quoting research by the housing charity Shelter. The repercussions go beyond the domestic: if you can’t create a permanent home, how can you settle in a place and find community?

In these circumstances, home becomes less about spaces themselves than the objects you can take with you — objects that are not just reminders of specific moments but carriers of meaning and ancestral ties. These things are bound up with who we are, where we’ve come from and what we want to be and, by placing them in new contexts — as migrant people have always done — we make ourselves at home again.

‘The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home’, by Michael McMillan (Lund Humphries, £21.99)

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