On 22 November 2025 Gunnersbury Park Museum welcomes you to join them in commemorating 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, they invite you to stand in solidarity and community, reflecting on past struggles and contemporary movements for justice.
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.
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.
Beverley Mason FRSA, Chief Executive of FHALMA
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.
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.
Contact the organisers: contact@fhalma.org
Photo credit: Eric & Jessica Huntley c2000’s © Mervyn Weir. Courtesy The Huntley Archives.