In the first two episodes of Steve McQueen’s quintet of films, collectively titled
Small Axe, the artist and film-maker points his lens at two distinct but related spaces of Black social pleasure: a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill in the late 1960s, and a house party in the same area a decade later. Both of these are, to varying degrees, embattled, from without and within.
The first film
,
Mangrove, takes its title from the historic Mangrove Restaurant, established on All Saints Road in 1968 by the community activist Frank Crichlow. It tells the story of the ‘Mangrove Nine’, a group of activists who led protests over the campaign of racist harassment against the restaurant by local police. In 1970 they were charged with incitement to riot, which led to a landmark 55-day trial.