Contemporary British identity still owes much to one of the most important demographic transformations in the country’s history: the mass immigration of the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when the people of the United Kingdom were coming to grips with the fact that the golden age of the British Empire was clearly ending, and Britain’s once-great power was eclipsed by the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the superpowers of the Cold War, British culture underwent a period of transformation and renewal caused by a large wave of immigration from Britain’s former overseas possessions.

This transformation was unexpected - and, to some, unwelcome. According to historian Paul Rich, the postwar generation of immigrants “found a society remarkably unprepared for their incorporation into its elaborate class and cultural networks.” Britain had long considered itself the natural centre of a global empire. Yet in the wake of World War II, most all of Britain’s remaining colonies were becoming independent countries. As decolonization progressed, millions sought to retain their place within the culture and economy of the dwindling “empire” by migrating to Britain itself. Moreover, thousands of people in the even more devastated countries of central and eastern Europe were hoping to move west, and many of these, too, wound up in Britain.

Government officials worried that the arrival of mass immigration would result in new racial tensions or even riots. Such conflicts had occurred in poor areas of London in the past. At the same time, government officials recognized that their war-torn country badly needed many of the professionals who were hoping to migrate. The first years after the mass immigrations were difficult ones. Far-right political parties stoked racial tensions. In 1958, an infamous days-long riot occurred at Notting Hill.

In the long term, however, those simmering racial tensions have largely been relegated to a fringe minority. In the long term, the arrival and the social and economic success of millions of migrants forced Britain to come to terms with its own transition from empire to modern nation. Britain, as the United Kingdom’s National Archives observes, has gone from a predominantly white centre of a global empire to “a multi-racial society” in which the full enjoyment of citizenship within the British Isles is not limited by one’s ethnicity.

The period of mass immigration did not last forever. By the end of the 1960s, the British government no longer saw mass immigration as necessary to fill gaps in its frail postwar economy. Over the next twenty years, immigration policy was gradually tightened again, increasingly restricting entry only to those who could qualify for specialized professional work permits or had existing family ties to people who were already citizens and residents. Racial tensions still existed, and ethnic communities argued that they continued to suffer from discrimination and inequality into the 1980s.

More than 50 years since the Notting Hill riots, British identity still remains in some ways uncertain and controversial. In times of economic hardship, resentment against immigrants can still flare up into nativist protests against open immigration policies, as has occurred in recent years over migration within the European Union and the infamous stereotyping of the “Polish plumber.” Nevertheless, it is now widely accepted that there is room within British identity for citizens of all backgrounds - an acceptance which was not at all clear or certain when mass immigration began in the 1950s.