New Beacon Books is the specialist bookshop, international book service and publishing house which has also worked closely with and supported many educational, cultural and political initiatives in the black community in Britain and continental Europe since its founding in 1966. New Beacon Books was initially set up as a publishing house by John La Rose with the active support and assistance of Sarah White. They were joined by Janice Durham in 1979 and Michael La Rose in 1983. In 1967 New Beacon Books went into bookselling because of the demand for books stimulated through the work of the Caribbean Artists Movement, also founded in late 1966 in Britain. There was also a cultural resurgence among blacks in Britain that came with the black consciousness and black power movements of that period.

New Beacon Bookshop has been a resource base for primary and secondary school teachers, university lecturers, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, writers on various genres, librarians, parents, students, community organisations and the general public. It has directly stimulated interest in works from and about the Caribbean, Africa, African America, Asia, black Britain and black Europe and has contributed to the development of the multi-cultural curriculum in the UK. The publishing house has provided opportunities for new creative voices from Britain and the diaspora, encouraging and enabling young and new writers and poets to get their work into print.

New Beacon Books has always believed that it was important to learn how to function as an independent organisation, a belief born out of the experience of John La Rose growing up in a colonial Trinidad. In a society where colonial policy was based on a deliberate withholding of information from the population, publishing and providing information are the vehicles for giving an independent validation to one’s own culture, history, politics, one’s own sense of self. The ethos and methods of working that have been key to the development of New Beacon Books since 1966 have been carried through into the work of the George Padmore Institute.

The work of the GPI is directed by a board of Trustees who have all been connected in some way with these educational, cultural and political activities. John La Rose was the Chairman of the Institute until his death in 2006, and the Institute is currently chaired by Michael La Rose with Sarah White as Secretary. It is due to the activities of New Beacon Books and its Trustees that the archives of the George Padmore Institute include a number of important and unique collections such as the Caribbean Artists Movement, the Black Education Movement, the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books and the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, amongst others. We also have in our possession, or will have in the future when the Institute is ready to manage them, the individual archives of a number of our Trustees including those of John La Rose, Gus John and Ian Macdonald QC. Some of these date back to the 1940s and 1950s.