Book review: Child Migrant Voices by Eithne Nightingale

Using East London as a base, Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain sheds light on the lived experiences of child migrants across the generations.

In March of 1938, eight-year-old Blanca Stern left her home country of Austria to board a boat from Holland to the UK. As the boat she’d be stuck on for ten hours tossed and turned with the sea, she wondered if it was her punishment for travelling on the Sabbath.

Along with the other children on board, Stern was fleeing persecution from the Nazis. When she got to the UK, she’d be greeted by a Rabbi who would host her and forty other children on campbeds in his mother’s small London home. 

In April 2022, 13-year-old Mariia left her home country of Ukraine to board a 22-hour bus to Poland, where she’d catch a flight into the United Kingdom. As she watched the bus leave, she could see her father running behind it, prolonging their goodbye.

Just days prior Russia had invaded Ukraine. Mariia and her mother were going to meet their British host family in Horsham, who would host them for the months to come. 

These stories open and close Eithne Nightingale’s book Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain. At the time they were interviewed for the book, Stern’s journey was eighty years behind her, whereas Mariia’s had been just four months prior. 

Roughly a quarter of the world’s population is under eighteen, but almost half of the world’s migrants are children. Still, their experiences are underrepresented – partially because they can be harder for children to explain at the time. 

‘I’ve interviewed people about their childhood, but often in their adulthood, they’re able to reflect,’ Nightingale says, ‘and that’s given an added dimension to the book.’

The 228-page book features powerful testimonies from across the globe from those who came to the UK as children. It is illustrated with beautiful black-and-white photography of the interviewees as children and is available in hardback and paperback. 

Each chapter feels like a mini-memoir, with the interesting life stories of each person given full space to shine through. Most chapters focus on just one testimony, but in instances the book broadens its scope, to tie in several voices to a larger social issue. 

Nightingale’s voice is present but subdued. She introduces us to each character and often provides context on how she met them without being didactic.

To write Child Migrant Voices, Nightingale was often brought back to the early days of her career as a charity worker in the fractured but hopeful East London of the 1970s and 80s. She worked as an Education Officer for the race relations unit in Camden and went on to become Director of the Tower Hamlets Training Forum.

Nightingale’s work initially ranged from providing support in the aftermath of racist attacks to the provision of housing and education for young people. Later she provided support and training for local Bengali clothing workers.

In the chapter titled The Battle for Brick Lane, she draws on her old contacts from the Bangladeshi youth movement in Tower Hamlets to see where life has led them.

‘It was a bit like coming home to those early years of activism when we were a lot younger,’ she says. Her former colleague Abdul Momen is eulogised, with whom Nightingale remembers protesting the murder of Altab Ali. The book is dedicated to Momen, who set Nightingale on her path. 

Later on, Nightingale went on to work as head of Diversity and Equality at the V&A and developed the ‘World in the East End’ gallery at their Museum of Childhood, which is now the Young V&A. 

‘The idea really was to diversify the collections,’ Nightingale said, ‘because the collections at that time were very much middle-class English childhood, and it didn’t reflect the heritage of East London.’

Inspired, Nightingale proposed a collaborative PhD between the V&A and Queen Mary University of London, to research the experiences of child migrants to East London. The PhD, undertaken between 2011 and 2019, provided the bulk of the research drawn on for the book, which was published in 2024. 

The physical book is only the tip of the iceberg – in collaboration with interviewees, the project has expanded into films, events and relationships. ‘It’s ongoing consent,’ Nightingale says, not a one-time agreement. 

‘These stories are incredibly rich, and it was a natural ambition for me to not only to share them but to have the involvement of people who shared their stories with me, to take them along with me in a way,’ Nightingale said. 

Next, the book will be developed into a series of podcasts and adapted into English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learning materials. 

As for child migrants of today? In 2023 alone 47.2 million children were displaced due to conflict and violence, according to UNICEF. Many of those arriving from the UK are coming from Sudan, which is facing extreme political instability. 

Nightingale is tentatively hopeful that the new Labour government might improve children’s rights in the UK’s migration system. Oral history can help drum up understanding. ‘It links to what’s happening politically, so it gives a face to the statistics,’ Nightingale says, ‘People can relate to in a way that they can’t to a statistic.’ 

Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain is a thorough and well-researched oral history, which provides academic context to the stories of child migrants. The book compiles the voices and lived experiences of a diverse group of child migrants to the UK, preserving stories that might otherwise be lost to time. 

Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain (£17.99 paper-back, published 8 Feb 2024 by Bloomsbury) is available for sale now. Enter the code CHILDMIGRANTVOICES for a 30% discount.