Windrush memorial to be built at Waterloo station - BBC News
The monument to the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants will be erected at Waterloo station.
The Empire Windrush ship brought West Indies immigrants to Britain from 1948

A monument honouring the "tremendous contribution" of the Windrush generation is to be erected in London.

Theresa May said the memorial, at Waterloo station, would be seen by "millions" of people every year.

The Windrush generation were workers who came to the UK from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971. Many arrived on the HMT Empire Windrush ship.

Events are taking place across the country on Saturday to mark the first National Windrush Day.

The Windrush Commemoration Committee, set up by the government last year, will work with designers of the monument on the "next steps over the coming months".

Mrs May said: "This monument will be a lasting legacy to the tremendous contribution the Windrush generation and their children have made to our great country."

Baroness Floella Benjamin, chair of the Windrush Commemoration Committee, said: "Having a Windrush monument located at Waterloo Station where thousands of Windrush pioneers - including children like myself - first arrived in London, will be a symbolic link to our past as we celebrate our future."

Janice Irwin, from community group Ageless Teenagers, described the plans as "fantastic", but also "long overdue", and said it was "a little strange" that it would be built at Waterloo Station, and not Brixton where many people from the Windrush generation settled.

Those from Jamaica were leaving a country that had been devastated by a hurricane and had a struggling economy.

Some of the Windrush generation were wrongly told after they had lived in the UK for decades they were in the country illegally.

Many lost their right to work or get NHS treatment, while others were detained or deported.

The then Home Secretary Amber Rudd apologised last year for the deportation threats, calling the scandal "wrong" and "appalling".

An estimated 500,000 people now living in the UK have been called the Windrush generation.

The HMT Empire Windrush first arrived at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on 22 June 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands, as a response to post-war labour shortages in the UK.

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