Charlie Phillips

My name is Charlie Phillips. I was born in 1944, in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. In those days Jamaica was a colony, a part of the huge British empire. Britain was considered a mother country for everyone all over the empire. When i was a little boy, after school I'd go down to Kingston Harbour to watch the ships coming and going to and from England.

I came to England when I was 11 years old. Now I was sailing on one of those ships, and loved it, so i'm one of those people you call the Windrush generation. I didn't come on the Empire Windrush, I came on another ship eight years later. But I'm called the Windrush generation, because I came from the Caribbean to settle in Britain after the end of the Second World War.

I lived with my parents in Notting Hill in West London. It was a part of London where many people from the Caribbean settled. Britain was very different from Jamaica. It was very grey, and often cold.

It was also hard for us because many British people didn't want to rent rooms to us because we were black. That wasn't against law in those days so housing was often overcrowded and i didn't have my own bedroom. I had to share with my parents.

In 1958, a couple of years after I arrived in Notting Hill, the race riots broke out. Black people had to defend themselves against the white British people who had been attacking them.

When I grew up, I wanted to be an opera singer or a naval architect designing ships - but people laughed at me. They didn't think I could get a creative job.

Sometimes African-American soldiers who were in Britain at the time would come to Notting Hill to join our Caribbean parties. One day an African-American air force man gave my father a camera. I used to play around with it. I bought a book called Do-It-Yourself Photography - that's how i taught myself photography from such a young age.

I didn't go to art school, I just read, practice and learn from my mistakes. I went around taking photographs of people and events in the community. I just wanted to capture images of people living their everyday lives.

At first I thought I'd take these photos, so when we went back to Jamaica people there could see what life was like in the mother country. In those days there were no mobile phones, internet or emails - you had to take photographs with a separate camera which had rolls of plastic inside. As a photographer i not only had to learn how to take great photographs but then I had to transfer my images off a plastic roll onto a print, so I taught myself how to develop the photographs. I did this at night in the bathroom when my parents were asleep.

Later on in life I went and took photographs all over Europe. I had more success there as a photographer than in Britain. Today my work is becoming better known - people are learning more through my photographs about black working class life in West London and of some of the forgotten parts of London history.

And today I still take photographs. Sometimes I capture images of ships, and I still love going to the opera. Can you make an artwork that captures life in your community