Taibah Shah Richardson

About Taibah Shah Richardson

For me, understanding ‘Heritage’ is important. A necessity, even. I have always been a bit obsessed with considering the ways that “I am” and “ we are” because “they were”. This heritage and legacy obsession, or understanding how what was led to what came to be, is probably the reason why this girl who grew up on a council estate in east London managed as a teen (in her sling back kitten heels and leather jacket) to talk her way through the interview to read history at Oxford.

Born of “mixed heritage”, in the long-gone Hackney ‘Mothers’ Hospital, I was one of five siblings -plus two cousins- in a Walthamstow house with three Punjabi-speaking generations. We spoke little English before starting school, but within a year of us kids leaving that house when I was 4, none of us could remember the mother tongue. Yet, still to this day, that language feels like home. Heritage is a bit like that, a refuge even when it is, in so many ways, ‘lost’.

From Walthamstow to the estate in Leyton where I lived from age 5 until a couple of years after uni, I’m a born and bred east Londoner, also granddaughter of a cockney nan who was bombed three times in the war. In my childhood, I would visit Nanny Rene, my “English” Nan, who lived in East Ham. I loved going with her to the launderette where she worked on Green Street, counting the 20p and £1s into piles, feeling calmed by the sound of the dryers going round.

Even after she had to leave Newham (priced out of her little flat), Nan would weekly catch the 58 bus to her shopping centre of choice, in the “old Stratford”…She never got to see the “new Stratford”… and many ‘residents’ don’t know the “old” still exists, its heritage not hidden but quiet, almost indiscernible amidst the height, shine and sound of the new centres of culture.

My interest in heritage is about honouring, uncovering, the old, giant (if hunched) shoulders on which the “new” can stand tall. It is partly a personal need for answers, partly a desire to return to a “home” that no longer exists except in stories and memories, and partly a responsibility – to never forget where we come from and to help us understand where we are going.