Black-Owned Huddersfield

Coming To Work

Huddersfield's Caribbean community goes back to the years after 1948, when labour shortages in public services and industry brought people from the Caribbean, mainly from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Grenada, Carriacou and St Lucia, through to the late 1960s. Many settled around St John's Road.

In the 1950s and 1960s large numbers of Caribbean men worked as bus conductors and drivers, and many Caribbean women found work in West Yorkshire's woollen mills and clothing factories. As Milton Brown, whose parents made the journey, has put it, they had to take jobs that nobody else wanted.

The Carriacou Connection

People from Carriacou, an island of Grenada, came to Huddersfield from the 1950s, and their community here is a long-standing one. In 2025 the Huddersfield artist Benaiah Matheson explored it in Town Island, an exhibition at the University of Huddersfield on the cultural and historical ties between Carriacou and the town.

Venn Street And Carnival

From the 1960s the Venn Street Club became one of the community's key meeting places, with sound systems, music and gatherings that kept people connected. The United Caribbean Association formed to offer mutual support and to challenge racial inequality. The original Hudawi Centre, the Huddersfield African and West Indian Centre on Great Northern Street, burned down in 1993.

In 1976 the town's first Caribbean carnival took those traditions into the streets.

Black Huddersfield Today

The community is telling its own story. Windrush: The Years After, a documentary led by Milton Brown with the University of Huddersfield, drew on more than 80 interviews with local people of African-Caribbean heritage, and its material is archived at Heritage Quay. Black-owned food spots, barbers, salons and brands are part of everyday Huddersfield.

Shop Black-owned businesses in Huddersfield on CashBlack.

Photo Credits

Huddersfield railway station. Photo: michael p brunt, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons