Empire Windrush: The cultural memory of an imaginary arrival

The arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 is understood as metonymic of the post‐war boom in immigration into Britain. However, the cultural memory of this episode is unsettled by the documentary evidence of the historical record. Nevertheless, these discrepancies do not serve to reveal some truer version of the event but instead assert the potency of the Windrush as a culturally imagined moment of arrival.