Dr Carol Fox on how young teachers and students benefited from the specialist multicultural bookshop in north London
I cannot believe that New Beacon Books is being allowed to close (Dismay as UK’s first specialist black bookshop forced to close, 29 December). New Beacon played a crucial role in supplying Caribbean, African and Indian fiction to schools such as Clissold Park comprehensive in Stoke Newington, where I was lucky enough to teach English. The head of English, Joan Goody, made sure that we young teachers visited the shop, read the books, met the authors and participated in multicultural events, and that pupils had access to fiction from their own and worldwide postcolonial backgrounds. The partnership of bookshop – really a cultural centre – and school was symbiotic and very exciting.
Joan Goody’s archive is housed at New Beacon, a source of guidance to modern educationists who wish to develop a multicultural, antiracist curriculum. New Beacon was a pioneering intellectual resource in London and is still at the geographical centre of a diverse area. It deserves to be saved.
Dr Carol Fox
Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex
