In October 1929, the African American actor and musician Paul Robeson, on a visit to England, ventured into London's Savoy Grill hoping to sample the fine cuisine for which the restaurant had become known. The world-renowned Robeson, much to his surprise, was refused service on account of the colour of his skin. The incident was picked up on and reported by the London press, and although it created something of a stir it failed to produce any new initiative to prevent recurrence of such practices. In 1931, West African law graduate O. A. Alakija was turned away from a London hotel on account of being a ‘man of colour’, and later that decade the black Trinidadian George Padmore wrote, ‘Few Negroes in England, I imagine, have not passed through the bitter experience of looking for apartments and being told constantly: “We do not take coloured people.”’

London in the 1930s was a city which had been deeply shaped by empire. It was also a city in which race played an important role, and these two aspects – the politics of empire and of race – often intersected with one another. As Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently argued, the early years of the twentieth century witnessed a hardening of global racial attitudes as a result of which Britain, the USA and the dominions of Australia, South Africa and Canada came to be understood as ‘white men's countries’, arrogating to themselves the status of bastions of civilisation.