Ealing: Let’s Celebrate!

Nov 6, 2025

Gunnersbury Park Museum to Mark 50th Anniversary of Historic Bogle-L’Ouverture Bookshop with Community Celebration

Down load event programme handout

London, 22 November 2025
Gunnersbury Park Museum will welcome community members, cultural leaders and young creatives to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Bogle-L’Ouverture Bookshop, the pioneering Black-owned bookshop founded in West Ealing in 1975 by Jessica and Eric Huntley.

Taking place as the highly successful People’s Unite exhibition on Southall in the 1970s and 1980s draws to a close, the event will invite audiences to stand in solidarity and community, reflecting on past struggles and contemporary movements for justice. Free to attend.

Presented in collaboration with the Friends of the Huntley Archives at LMA Foundation (FHALMA), the celebration will also mark ten years of partnership between The Huntley Archives and Gunnersbury Park Museum — a decade of shared commitment to honouring Black British history and amplifying community voices.

The day will feature intergenerational panel conversations, a Young Curators’ pop-up exhibition, rare archival displays, bookstalls and a community cultural close, offering an opportunity to engage with the living legacy of one of Britain’s most influential Black cultural institutions.

The Bogle-L’Ouverture Bookshop — named for Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jamaican freedom fighter Paul Bogle — will be honoured not only as a bookshop, but as a centre of political education, cultural resistance and community organising. From its first premises in Chignell Place, West Ealing, it provided space for intellectual exchange, creativity and solidarity at a time of intense anti-racist and anti-fascist struggle.

Through Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, Jessica and Eric Huntley championed authors including Walter Rodney, Andrew Salkey, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Beryl Gilroy, Valerie Bloom and other groundbreaking writers, laying foundations for Black British publishing and widening access to critical ideas, radical imagination and cultural pride.

Beverley Mason FRSA, Chief Executive of FHALMA, said:

“This anniversary celebrates more than a bookshop — it celebrates a movement. Jessica and Eric Huntley inspired generations to read, to organise and to dream. As we gather to honour their legacy, we recognise the power of archives, memory and community to shape our futures.”

A Gunnersbury Park Museum spokesperson added:

“We are honoured to host this milestone event. The Huntleys’ legacy is part of the cultural fabric of Ealing and an important chapter in Britain’s history. This celebration will encourage visitors to reflect on how activism, creativity and solidarity continue to shape our present.”

This anniversary will form part of a wider series of activities leading toward the 20th anniversary of the Huntley Archives at the London Archives, City of London, with a one-day festival on 29th November, reaffirming their place as a cornerstone of African-Caribbean heritage in Britain.

For further information, please contact:
contact@fhalma.org

Notes to Editors

  • The Bogle-L’Ouverture Bookshop opened in West Ealing on 20 November 1975.

  • Jessica and Eric Huntley received the Freedom of the Borough of Ealing.

  • The Huntley Archives are housed at The London Archives and constitute one of the most significant African-Caribbean archival collections in the UK.

 

Credit Caption: Eric Huntley with Keith Waite (flute), Alfred David (guitar) and Tuup (African Drums) at The Bogle-L’Ouverture Bookshop launch event, November 1975

Photo: Courtesy of the Huntley Archives at The London Archives; Archive reference: LMA/4462/F/02/016/P