Tony Warner has spent nearly two decades making London tell the fuller truth about itself. In 2007, he founded Black History Walks, a platform that brings thousands of years of African and Caribbean history into the streets, waterways, and public spaces of the capital through guided walks, bus tours, river cruises, talks, films, and courses—15 distinct experiences built to educate, challenge, and reconnect people with what’s too often left out.
His work has been recognised widely, with features across BBC, ITV, The Guardian, Time Out, and Channel 4, while his impact reaches classrooms too: as a contributor to the groundbreaking Pearson Edexcel GCSE Migrants in Britain student book, he helped introduce Black British Civil Rights into the curriculum at GCSE level for the first time. Beyond the streets and schools, Warner is also the co-founder and chair of African Odysseys, the long-running grassroots film programme at the BFI Southbank that has spent 15 years screening African diaspora cinema and hosting Q&As—building one of the UK’s most vital, consistent spaces for these stories to be seen and heard.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Congratulations and best wishes with your book ‘Black History Walks Vol 1’. What do you most want people to unlearn about when Black history in Britain begins—and why does that misconception persist?
I’d like people to ‘unlearn’ the idea that Black history=slavery; the myth that 1948 was when Black people first arrived in Britain or that Britain ‘civilised’ the Empire, and all the other stereotypes about the Black presence in the UK and African history in general.
Mainstream media/ education chooses to perpetuate those myths because they help launder the white supremacist violence that is part and parcel of the coloniser’s behaviour. The oppression, abuse and inhumanity of empire is routinely covered up and watered down to excuse the behaviour, which then justifies both the gigantic robbery and the resultant racism.
For example, Lloyds of London insurers made millions of pounds from insuring kidnapped humans for hundreds of years. Lloyds is now worth £92 billion, but the foundation of that wealth is African bodies. Lloyds’ algorithms for calculating insurance premiums were so detailed that they stated that if too many African women were on board the prison-kidnap ships, there was more chance of a rebellion therefore, they charged a higher premium to the slave owners. This fact and more was revealed in Professor Rebecca Hall’s 2022 book ‘Wake: A Hidden History of Women-led slave Revolts. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/library-research-services/collections/community-voices-perspectives/wake-hidden
We mention this on our walks alongside the fact that the Tower of London is full of South African diamonds, the Great Star of Africa and the lesser Star of Africa are fixed in the Crown Jewels, the biggest attraction at the Tower of London. These diamonds were extracted by blatant colonial conquest https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/great-star-of-africa-diamond-intl-lgs/index.html
As a top ten London tourist attraction, you have to pay £32 per person to see them. The Tower gets about 3 million visitors per year paying to see stolen African goods. None of that £96 million goes to building schools, hospitals or libraries in South Africa, so when British people hear about reparations, this is just one example of decades-old robbery benefitting the thieves in 2026. It is rarely put in those terms by mainstream historians, TV shows or tour guides, however.
What’s your research methodology in practice—how do you move from archives and footnotes to a route you can physically walk, where each stop has emotional and historical weight?
This is our 20th year of operation; we have 21 walks, monthly films, Black history /bus tours, river cruises, canal cruises, steam train trips and helicopter tours. www.blackhistorywalks.co.uk The canal/steam and helicopter trips are unique in the world by the way. For all of them, the route is determined by what happened on that street, piece of land or waterway. Those details inform the narrative. The stories come from the people who passed through those areas as well as whatever is in the environment.
There’s no part of London where you can’t find some compelling Black history. For example, apart from the body snatching, medical experiments and the use of Henrietta Lacks cells to cure diseases relevant to any hospital https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czj1pw0rmmgo ;
There’s the award-winning doctor from St Barts Hospital near St Paul’s, who invented the world-famous surgical technique that has saved the lives of millions of women. It’s called the B-Lynch suture. It’s a simple and cheap way to prevent bleeding in women who have just given birth. The B stands for Balogun, as in Christopher Balogun Lynch, a Black man from Sierra Leone who started off as a porter at Barts in the 1970s, then went on to become the Queen’s personal gynaecologist in the 2000s! https://www.rcog.org.uk/membership/fellows-and-members/obituaries-of-rcog-fellows-and-members/obituary-christopher-balogun-lynch/
This guy should have a couple of statues by now and be a worldwide household name. These are the types of amazing, factual stories we tell but for some strange reason they are vastly under-publicised.
How do you decide which stories become “anchors” on a walk, and which remain off-route but still matter—what’s your filter for significance?
If by anchor you mean physical focal point, then even if a walk is in Notting Hill, we can talk about Panama if we want. Portobello Road is only named so due to the ‘great victory’ of Admiral Vernon, who was sent to the Caribbean in 1739 to rip off the Spanish colonies there. He attacked and sacked the city of Portobello on the Panamanian coast and brought shiploads of money back to England. As this was seen as such a significant victory and because people bought land with the booty from Portobello, locals renamed areas in London, Scotland and Ireland after where the money came from. Portobello is a Spanish word and means beautiful door or port.
That name therefore automatically links you to the Caribbean and how, in the 1800s, the European powers, France/Spain/Britain/Holland were making money from sugar, rum, tobacco and selling human beings, while fighting over those territories, which is why they speak English, Spanish, French and Dutch to this day. All of that massive cash flow and enormous land theft totally transformed European societies/economies. The people doing all the hard work to produce those crops were not getting paid at all. Those gigantic profits were funnelled back to London, Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam for hundreds of years. This is one of the reasons the nearby Bank of England was nicknamed the Bank of the West Indies, the old name for the Caribbean. Due to the impact of George Floyd, we were able to get this type of information into the Pearson GCSE History Migration textbook https://shop.migrationmuseum.org/products/gcse-edexcel-history-migrants-in-britain-c800-present-student-book?srsltid=AU7gw4WUaGn8yp6JlB8Mz62nZ4CJEVU4B_ScDPTBDx3IIo-llws5J4Sj
as the book includes our Notting Hill walk and is now used by 15,000 pupils.
In your work, London isn’t just a backdrop; it’s an active character. What parts of the city feel most honest about their past, and what parts feel most invested in forgetting?
The standard infrastructure for telling stories of London is dishonest. Even now you can do umpteen tours lasting 25 hours that don’t mention Black British history or do so in the most cursory manner. The typical river cruises/bus tours will mention Cleopatra’s Needle (Kemet’s stolen obelisk plonked on the Embankment since 1878 ) but only since George Floyd do they reference it being stolen, although that is not the word they use. They certainly don’t make the point that the 3500 year-old 180 ton, 68-foot-tall granite structure carved as a single piece out of a mountain is 1500 years older than London. Nor do they make it explicit that the ancient, technologically advanced civilisation that created it was African. That African nation existed more than a thousand years before the Romans; not the British who built Londonium, from which London gets its name.
Children in school this October will, on the whole, not be taught that fact or told about Mansa Musa from Mali, West Africa, being the richest man in the world 700 years ago long before the British even got to Africa. They will, however, likely be told to watch Stormzy videos, listen to Barack Obama speeches or as happened in 2018, be told to dress up as slaves https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/17/east-london-primary-school-head-apologises-for-slave-dress-letter
What’s the most surprising discovery you’ve made about a familiar London landmark—something that changed how you personally see the city?
Our helicopter tour flies over West India Dock, now better known as Canary Wharf, and from the air you can see the scale of the dock complex that was financed and built with Caribbean money so the slave owners could make even more money from the products of the West Indies, hence they gave it the name ‘West India Dock’. It was enormous when it was built and an excellent symbol of the wealth extracted from Black people to enrich Britain. Even in the 1980s, those multinational banks that are located there, like Barclays, HSBC, Chase, Credit Suisse etc were investing billions in Apartheid South Africa against Mandela’s demands which is why many of them were boycotted by local British people. https://www.aamarchives.org/campaigns/barclays-and-shell.html
How do you balance evidence and imagination—especially when the archive is silent, biased, or deliberately incomplete about Black lives?
The evidence comes from countless books, documentaries and personal experiences of elders. In my book Black History Walks Volume 1 https://jacarandabooks.co.uk/products/black-history-walks-1 we’re building on the work of people like Prof Hakim Adi, Prof Gus John, Marika Sherwood, Richard Hart, Mia Morris, John La Rose, Jessica Huntley, Peter Fryer and, more importantly, Mum, Dad, Auntie, Grandad etc. That evidence is all around you in your own family. The imagination comes with how you get those stories across through various delivery methods: land/sea/air, films, talks, walks, etc
Your tours connect history to the present. What patterns keep repeating across centuries—power, labour, policing, culture, migration—and where do you see genuine change?
One pattern that is very clear is how much emphasis white institutions put on suppressing Black history as a method of control and way of disempowering people. The recent attacks via redundancy/cancellation on Black history educators like Professors: Hakim Adi, Robert Beckford, Lez Henry, Deidre Osborne, Kehinde Andrews, all of whom had their educational courses cut despite their popularity/effectiveness or rarity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2d6eg050o
In many cases the universities lied or went back on their George Floyd era promises. The same thing happened at the British Film Institute (BFI) where despite a 2023 written agreement to hold a 20th anniversary season of the popular, monthly, anti-racist, Black history film series called African Odysseys in 2026, the BFI cancelled the programme in 2025 after they:
- Refused to talk to the volunteers who ran the monthly programme since 2007, putting in £6 million of labour into the charity https://www.change.org/p/save-17-years-of-black-film-history-at-british-film-institute/u/33635896 NB this figure does not include the monthly box office profits from 2007 all of which went to the BFI including the regular sell-outs of their 450-seater at £10.00 a head.
- Refused to answer 8 simple questions for two years like: ‘What is the budget for African Odysseys? Why does BFI Flare have 8 times more staff than AO? What is the racial composition of BFI’s Sight & Sound staff by rank and length of service? https://www.change.org/p/save-17-years-of-black-film-history-at-british-film-institute/u/33273355
- Refused to carry out a legally required Equality Impact Assessment which they had agreed to do after a meeting with the volunteer curators in July 2024 https://www.change.org/p/save-17-years-of-black-film-history-at-british-film-institute/u/34332068
- Refused to listen to 20 academics who are experts in race equality like; Professor Sir Patrick Vernon, Dame Professor Elizabeth Anionwu, Professor Paul Gilroy, Professor Hakim Adi, Professor Gus John, Professor June Bam-Hutchinson and Dr Margaret Busby.
- Refused to meet Professor Gus John 3 times, who offered his expertise for free and actually helped write the Race Equality laws when Jack Straw was Home Secretary in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry.
- Refused to listen to/acknowledge the 19,000 petitioners who want the series to continue. This is incredible considering the BFI is a taxpayer, publicly funded charity and no other film series in its 93-year history has ever garnered this much support from the public
- Cancelled the only meeting with the volunteers two hours before it was due to start https://www.change.org/p/save-17-years-of-black-film-history-at-british-film-institute/u/33186497
- Presently lying to hundreds of thousands of its own subscribers and millions of the general public as we have proven twice https://www.change.org/p/save-17-years-of-black-film-history-at-british-film-institute/u/35345456
The reasons given by BFI for the cancellation… ‘to cut costs and promote diversity despite African Odysseys making money for the BFI and bringing tens of thousands of global majority people to the BFI Southbank. It makes no sense.
The intention was clearly to stop the education inherent in all the above situations because it was having an effect. People were learning and taking action with that knowledge, and the powers -that-be had a problem with that.
The BFI’s intent was clearly to destroy this successful two decades old Black history film programme that was uplifting human education by getting rid of the only person there with 18 years of Black film knowledge and deleting his 48 weeks of work post entirely meaning there was no way the work could continue. This was a very spiteful action on the eve of what should have been 20 years of celebration. This is especially insulting as we know there are 16 cinemas that offer weekly dog-friendly screenings where the animals have their needs met and can even sit on the chairs, but there is no cinema with monthly Black history offerings… https://www.change.org/p/save-17-years-of-black-film-history-at-british-film-institute/u/35270848
We had planned loads of anniversary films and events for 2026 on:
- New Cross Fire and Black people’s day of action
- Joy Gardner’s killing
- Frantz Fanon season
- Reparations
- 60 years of Black British Civil Rights
- Ishmail Blagrove season
We still ran them but with no advertising budget and in smaller venues.
African Odysseys continues outside the BFI using grassroots resources. We have 6 films on between, October- December 2026 in association with the Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival. They cover 60 years of Carnival, Black British Civil Rights, Boxing, Olympics, Renaissance Art, and Comedy as can be seen here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/2849465606
You’ve worked across walking tours, film programming, and education. Which medium gets people to shift their worldview fastest—and which creates the deepest, longest-lasting change?
Education is in all of our events, and as far as a quick worldview change is concerned, I’d probably say film. I’ve shown 10 minutes of footage of Black soldiers in World War 1 to a very sceptical crowd of white civil servants who had negative views of Black people. Afterwards one guy came up to me and said, ‘I had always said that Blacks would never fight for this country, but I’ve been proven wrong and it’s changed the way I think’
I showed the same footage to 300 Black people at Stratford Circus Theatre. One week later I bumped into a brother, about 35, who was in the audience. I spent half an hour outside Whipps Cross Hospital giving him further book, museum and DVD references; as to quote him he ‘simply could not believe what he was seeing and it had bothered him for a week’. He thought the footage was fake. That experience blew his mind. The film is about the Caribbean soldiers who fought for Britain in Palestine in 1918 (World War 1). They got battle honours but were then told to wash the clothes and clean the toilets of white soldiers in Italy. They mutinied. The film is called Mutiny by Tony Tee and was on Channel 4. It can be seen here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mutiny-Helena-Appio/dp/B0FVBMP5YD It’s the sort of film African Odysseys would show.
African Odysseys has sustained film screenings and Q&As for years. What do you think cinema can do for diaspora memory that textbooks and museums often can’t?
African Odysseys is now in its 20th year, but it first started as Education through Film with the youth mentoring charity 100 Black Men of London 25 years ago.
It can take weeks to read a book, and museums have to be visited and be expertly curated to get the information across effectively. A film, however, in just 90 minutes, can convey hundreds of years of history as well as excite and inspire. Pupils can spend two weeks studying Rosa Parks, but watching 90 minutes of The Rosa Parks story starring Angela Bassett makes that story come alive and certain scenes stick in your head. It’s immediate and can be long-lasting.
There’s an amazing book called Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington. I talked about 5 of my friends; they HAD to read that book. 6 months later, none of them had done so. Knowing the above, I sat down at my laptop and converted her book into an interactive PowerPoint lasting 2 hours and delivered it in libraries, universities, and youth clubs. I got an average of 250 people coming to those events for about 5 years.
I can give you an example of Hollywood film propaganda that’s a great, popular movie based on pure lies about Black people. Tom Cruise made two Top Gun movies. Very enjoyable, made a bunch of money, but based on racist exclusion. The first-ever Top Gun aerial combat competition in 1949 was won by an all-Black fighter pilot unit who were given obsolete planes to go up against the brand new P51 Mustang fighters flown by white pilots. The white pilots cheated during the competition, and the Black pilots were so good they still won. The competition winners were listed as ‘unknown’ for 47 years. The trophy was ‘lost’ for 55 years. Sounds unbelievable right? Well, you can see Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey explain the details in 3 minutes here, and he was there in 1949. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVTCBWy4S_A
While tens of millions know about Tom Cruise’s invented white pilot character and his pretend missions due to that movie, they’ve never heard of this real-life hero who was volunteering to fight and die for his country at a time his people could not vote. Where’s that movie?
You’ve helped place blue plaques for diasporic historical figures. What does public commemoration get right, and what does it risk—especially when institutions want the symbolism without the discomfort?
In collaboration with the charity Nubian Jak, We’ve put up 10 plaques so far to James Baldwin, Darcus Howe, Phyllis Wheatley, Dr Harold Moody, Sarah Parker Remond, Dr Cecil Belfield Clarke, Frank Chrichlow, Emma Clarke, Dr Beryl Gilroy, Dennis Brown, Billy Waters. We’re presently working on a plaque to two Black American boxers, one of whom, Bill Richmond, owned his own pub and gym on the site of the National Gallery, where he trained MP’s and aristocrats like Lord Byron in 1810, when the British still practiced slavery. He was the first Black international athlete long before Muhammad Ali. His story is incredible as he started off in New York as someone’s property. It’s taken ten years of negotiation, but we’ve finally got permission from the National Gallery to put up a blue plaque in his honour on the corner of Trafalgar Square. We just need 6 grand more to pull it off. The GoFundMe is here https://www.gofundme.com/f/blue-plaque-to-honour-bill-richmond-and-tom-molyneaux
What does “success” look like for you now: bigger audiences, policy impact, curriculum change, or something more personal—like the moment a person sees themselves in the story?
In this racist climate, just existing is a success; some marriages don’t last 20 years. Hope to get another 20 and produce and distribute more films. More curriculum books. A volume 2,3,4 of the book is on the cards too.
With Black History Walks, what do you hope readers will do differently after closing the book—how should it change the way they move through London the very next day?
Well, from what people have said to me so far, they feel empowered, proud, revitalised. Here are some quotes:
Thank you very much for the grand tour of the oldest part of London. That was the tour of a lifetime and most enlightening. I realise more than ever before how our ancestors and countries contributed to the wealth of the British Empire
Prof Norman Maphosa, Vice-Chancellor, Solosi University, Zimbabwe
Just a few words from the Guild of Walkers: we enjoyed ourselves immensely; what a tour! Having worked in London for 30 years, walking in and around, passing those landmarks, images, icons, churches, streets… this was one of the most beautiful walks I’ve ever had
Glenda Trew, Guild of Walkers
2007 from Gideon (who was working as a cleaner in a North London hospital but moved back to Uganda soon after attending one of my talks)
You know I was greatly touched by your
session. In those few minutes I learnt a lot. I have
read the book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”; it was,
in addition to your session my eye-opener! I saw that the
trap was that I was sitting on my potential and was
heading for a life of frustration and regret. Can you
imagine I have an MSc in Food Safety Management and a BSc
Food Science and Technology (2.1)! I could not find
work in my field due to the reasons you highlighted in
your session, and I was forced to do work which was
not in line with my skills just because I had to pay
bills! I said to myself, life can be difficult, but
you choose how it treats you; I opted out. I am getting
my feet here in Uganda,
2009 from Gideon
I am a lecturer in a University, and also I run a private consultancy and training company in food processing technology…
I have a few more like that which I think I’ll put into the next book.
The Fight Continues!
For further information, please visit the following social media links:
Youtube channel: 600 short to long videos on Black history https://www.youtube.com/@blackhistorywalks/videos
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/blackhistorywalks/
Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/blackhistorywalks
Website www.blackhistorywalks.co.uk
Latest newsletter with details of coming events https://myemail.constantcontact.com/6-great-films-from-tonight-to-this-weekend.html?soid=1102546528894&aid=w5Hxdz_2n4U
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