In January 2014, I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to travel to Gujarat in western India as part of a British Council-funded Connecting Cultures scheme. The aim was to explore the area’s historic links to Redbridge through the East India Company and to enhance the museum’s connections to the large Gujarati communities who live in the borough.
Many of these communities descend from business people who followed the British imperial expansion into Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in the early-20th century. But after African independence in the 1960s and the expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin in 1972, many came to the UK to make new lives.
Interestingly, a Redbridge man had been responsible for the first English trading post in India. Sir Thomas Rowe was a diplomat who persuaded the Mughal emperor Jahangir to allow the East India Company to trade from the Gujarati city of Surat all the way back in 1615.
We also discovered around 30 East India Company merchants who lived in Redbridge during the 17th and 18th centuries as it was close to the London docks but sufficiently far away to still be in open countryside.
By a strange coincidence, I came across a prehistoric horse bone from Ilford displayed in a dusty case in the Baroda Museum (built in 1894 in the style of the Victoria and Albert and Science museums in London) in Vadodara, Gujarat. Ilford became one of the richest archaeological sites of ice age relics in Britain when 19th-century workmen who were extracting clay for the brick industry unearthed many fossils, which they then sold to Victorian collectors.
Like any traveller to India, I took some time getting used to the mad honking of rickshaw horns and blasé attitude to road safety, but the delicious food and people’s hospitality more than made up for it.
Gerard Greene is the manager, of Redbridge Museum & Heritage Service, east London. India’s Gateway: Gujarat, Mumbai & Britain runs until 28 January 2017 at Redbridge Museum
Many of these communities descend from business people who followed the British imperial expansion into Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in the early-20th century. But after African independence in the 1960s and the expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin in 1972, many came to the UK to make new lives.
Interestingly, a Redbridge man had been responsible for the first English trading post in India. Sir Thomas Rowe was a diplomat who persuaded the Mughal emperor Jahangir to allow the East India Company to trade from the Gujarati city of Surat all the way back in 1615.
We also discovered around 30 East India Company merchants who lived in Redbridge during the 17th and 18th centuries as it was close to the London docks but sufficiently far away to still be in open countryside.
By a strange coincidence, I came across a prehistoric horse bone from Ilford displayed in a dusty case in the Baroda Museum (built in 1894 in the style of the Victoria and Albert and Science museums in London) in Vadodara, Gujarat. Ilford became one of the richest archaeological sites of ice age relics in Britain when 19th-century workmen who were extracting clay for the brick industry unearthed many fossils, which they then sold to Victorian collectors.
Like any traveller to India, I took some time getting used to the mad honking of rickshaw horns and blasé attitude to road safety, but the delicious food and people’s hospitality more than made up for it.
Gerard Greene is the manager, of Redbridge Museum & Heritage Service, east London. India’s Gateway: Gujarat, Mumbai & Britain runs until 28 January 2017 at Redbridge Museum
