The Colour of Love Project

I mean we’ve all seen Love Actually… So you’re guessing it doesn’t take a genius to get that love is basically best summed up as the final scene of the film - waiting in an airport to run and embrace with flapping arms, into somebody else's flappy arms with plenty of smiles and hugs and kisses galore – right? But often there is a little more to that love stuff that the soppy parts of films portray...

A project set up in Notts is doing its best to uncover and show some of the struggles of love and the lengths that people in Notts went through years ago to be with the ones they love.

Although it's easy to see that we live in a right old multicultural town, memories of our city’s past clashes involving race and romance are not as visible. 

Coleen Francis, who lives near St Ann’s developed the project with the support of Volunteers who gave the project the title: ‘The Colour of Love’. 

The project was set up to focus on capturing and preserving the experiences of African-Caribbean/ European mixed race relationships in Nottinghamshire between the nineteen-forties to the nineteen-seventies.

She was inspired by her own family's experiences as her grandmother had physically beaten her mother in attempt to stop her dating her father, a black Jamaicanman during the late nineteen fifties. She is working, with the help of some lovely volunteers, to capture the stories of white women and black men from Nottingham in relationships from the nineteen-forties to the nineteen-seventies.

Speaking to her it is clear her passion for the project is relevant and exciting. She said that, “It’s important that this history is captured and there for future generations”.

The project is looking for volunteers and people who would like to share their stories is even running free training sessions for adults, including a cultural sensitivity workshop and training to develop interviewing techniques and put them into practise, to effectively communicate, record and document memories.

Today, according to the National Statistics classification, mixed-race people are the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the UK and previous statistics have shown Notts to have a high number of mixed race people and mixed race relationships, which makes it one of the best places for this project to focus on.

The project will show us how these men and women have paved the way for mixed race relationships to be accepted in modern society. After all, it’s thanks to these trailblazers that we have more freedom to check out, date or fall in love with whomever we want.

So in case you hadn’t already got the message, love knows no limits, and if you’re in love no one should bloody tell ya not to be!