Exhibition visit: "Adopting Britain, 70 Years of Migration", Royal Festival Hall

To start of our projects on identity we were asked to go and visit the display “Adopting Britain, 70 Years of migration” at the Royal Festival Hall. The exhibition gave viewers an insight into the different types of migration to Britain that has occurred within the last 70 years and the different reasons why people would abandon their lives to come and live here.

Within the section of the exhibition entitled Why do they come here it explores the Journeys of Ugandan Asians who were expelled from Uganda in their thousands in the early 1970s by the then dictator Idi Amin, many of whom eventually found sanctuary in Leicester. It was this section of the display that particularly caught my attention as in this case the people were given just 90 days to leave their homes, and were only permitted to take one bag and £55 with them. It was this characteristic of this particular case that forced the viewers to ask themselves what they would bring with them if they had to rush to pack up their lives in one bag and leave their home, uncertain of where their journey would end. Luggage tags and pencils were left out for visitors to share what they would bring with them if they had to leave their homes suddenly. It was interesting to see what different people of differing age groups considered to be essential to them.

What one might chose to pack in their bag is of course subjective to that individual. I feel it was this factor that occurs in many forms of migration that was meant to spark us as students into thinking about our own identities and what aspects of our lives we would consider to be most important to us.