大象传媒

Amidst all the coverage of contemporary migration to Britain, it is easy to forget the older generations of immigrants from across the world who have settled here and made Britain their home.

In this series, Mike Berlin, an urban historian from Birkbeck College, University of London, visits individual streets at the heart of such communities, to hear the stories of earlier immigrants - their arrival, their early lives and their observations on Britain today.

In this opening episode - the story of the Polish political refugees who settled in Britain in the late 1940s has been largely forgotten.

It involves invasion by both Germany and Russia and deportation to Siberia, followed by a brave share of the armed combat of World War Two. In spite of this, Stalin's influence after the war meant they had no home to return to and were excluded from the victory parades.

They tell Mike Berlin about the lives they made in Bradford, the community they built around Edmund Street, and their thoughts on a younger generation of economic immigrants, who have the one thing they craved - the choice to return home, if they wished, to Poland.

Producer: Beaty Rubens

First broadcast on 大象传媒 Radio 4 in April 2013.