The Walter Rodney Bookshop (No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990)

McMillan was commissioned by FHALMA (Friends of the Huntley Archive at the London Metropolitan Archives) to recreate the Walter Rodney Bookshop as an installation for the group exhibition No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960s – 1990s at the Guildhall Gallery, London, 2015-16. The resulting installation was large dark brown wooden structure that had lifesize photographs of New Bookshop’s bookshelves covering the walls to provide an immersive experience of being in a bookshop. Located in the walls were four interactive multi-media screens developed in collaboration with Dubmorphology, from which could be accessed printed matter, archive photos, audio, films from the Huntley Archives of Eric and Jessica Huntley (deceased 2013) based at the London Metropolitan Archives.

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Each screen featured a different theme: 

  • From the Front Room to the Front Line 

  • Race, Revolts & Resistance

  • A Day in the Life of the Bogle-L’Ouverture Bookshop 

  • The International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books

At the back of the installation was a table with a typewriter, a Rolodex (a rotating file device storing business contact information), and tape cassette recorder/player that Jessica Huntley would have used everyday in the Bookshop.

In the centre was a long table that displayed reproduced archive material: pamphlets, brochures and leaflets on top of a map of London that demarcated where Black and independent bookshops, publishers, community centres and organisations, activist, cultural and arts organisations were located during the 1970s and 1980s. 

McMillan, along with other writers, poets and Eric Huntley gave a series of talks and led workshops in the installation with diverse audiences including school groups.